Rule the Waves thread

files.catbox.moe/f5c80q.7z
Make sure to backup your mapdata.dat file in the data folder first and replace it afterwards if you want to play as Spain or use the original map. I put a quick readme in as well.
Currently it's nothing special, just Austria Hungary with crazy tech, a set of new names and a silly flag but once I wrap my head around adding custom regions and battles I'm going to set them up with a bias towards big fleet battles. Also going to steal the Turkroach faction from another mod because Orks vs Turkroach is just too good a concept to pass up.
Just extract it into the game's base directory (if you want to do it manually the flag goes in the flags folder and the rest goes in the data folder).

What did he mean by this?

Nice though I guess not good for a new player.

Raiders/subs outside of their home region have some effect, but it's generally not worth the money.
It randomizes each tech category's research rate by around +/-50%, greatly increases the chance of researching techs out of order or skipping a tech altogether, gives you a chance of bypassing the minimum year requirements on most techs, and gives everybody one of several major handicaps (unreliable double/triple turrets, unreliable torpedoes, halved gun penetration and increased machinery weight are the ones I've seen).
Set the realism setting to "Captain" and do it manually. The torpedo AI is totally retarded, it'll launch everything it has at a maneuvering CL at the edge of your range but will totally ignore the battleship you just spent fifty turns getting in front of.
Either spam raiders/subs/blockade until they collapse, or pray for an invasion event while blockading them.

Yeh you'd want a good few games under your belt.

RtW2 confirmed for 2018.

While this thread is here; where the hell did you go, DM user?
Right here user. Apologies for disappearing, my grandfather got ill suddenly and I spent about two weeks with him in the hospital before he passed. I considered starting another thread, but figured most people would have lost interest.

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That's a shitty thing to happen user and something I'm dreading myself because mine is getting on a bit.
Could always gauge some interest in this thread then when it goes over the bump limit start a new one for another game. That'd give anons plenty of warning that it was starting again. If we need more variety there are a ton of custom nations on the game's forums.

On the topic of the ML-class AC's, I'm always a bit hesitant to use mid-size ACs, since I feel their too fragile to act as fleet ships and to expensive to use as pickets. That being said, the two we built in this playthrough serve to the present day (1944).

My plan had been to wait for RtW2, since I've ran three(?) campaigns with Holla Forums, but if there's enough interest I'll certainly be down for another. I'm looking forward to RtW2, it's actually the only game I can think of that I'm 'hyped' for, I just hope it makes improvement in RtW's weakest aspects. Interested to know how carriers are going to function and how air units will be represented.

I've lost a German BB to a single 10" shell, not through a mag explosion, but because the crew somehow couldn't stop the (minor) flooding.

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Honestly I'd be ok with just RtW + carriers and polish, the ideal would be other nations fighting each other.
Strange, was the weather really shitty or something?

Super-superfiring guns are best.

My top three things I'd request would be:
Uncertain. It was a long time ago and I didn't screencap the damage log.

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It's understandable that you might not want to or feel demoralized about starting up again after that. My condolences.

Man, I forgot how much of a fleet of oldies we ended up having, even if we tried to build them futureproof & retrofitted them constantly. Mussolini's Lamborghini is proof of that. And don't think of her as 'mid-size!' She's as big as you can get without technically being a battlecruiser, in order to bully anything below her and slink away from the rest. A compromise between self-preservation and gaming the engagement system. As fleet support platform for eight extra ten-inch cannons & twenty screening guns otherwise, she did her job. Mostly by getting beat to hell, spitting hell back, and then limping away while something else seals the deal, as I recall.

Did you continue the save on your own at all when we left off? Do you think we could've licked the British for Gibraltar? Was the Italian fleet the sick man of the Med in retrospect, with 40 year old ships serving alongside fresh new fast battleships, retrofit or no? We were always operating on a knifes' edge budget and against superior numbers, so we could almost never afford to decommission ships outright in favor of new construction, but still, it seems more egregious now than then.

'Before the end of this year' as a release date means it could be equally likely to be released in the summer, fall, or winter. I say to ask yourself if you want to wait however long to run another thread and go from there.

I just hope they don't break things, personally. The battleship was on its way out, but people thinking the CAG was the end-all be-all rather than a step forward accompanied by opposing balls dropped and some grand strat tending to model them as really long range guns tends to lead to their blowing everything out of the water chafes me. The WW2 scenarios will be interesting regardless; clinching success as the Axis in particular.

Fifteen main guns? That's mad, what time/techframe is this to get triple buttguns? The torp tubes are a bizarre choice, though. Was this an AI construct from the Italy game or is this one of yours?

Those are a thing ingame?
I'd also want the balance of battles tipped a bit to allow for larger navys actually having more ships in the average engagement: currently you can just go quality over quantity and generally be ok if you can avoid a crushing blockade. Also perhaps some modification to allow more than a hard 6 nations in each game.

Really the Pacific is where carriers mattered most in WW2 so hopefully we'll still have variety.
You could have 16 with 4x4 once quads are unlocked.

By the way this (found a link on the RtW forums) makes for interesting reading about the time period.
archive.org/stream/brasseysnavala1902brasuoft#page/n11/mode/2up

I hope they get better submarine mechanics in RtW2. Customizable carrier planes would be nice, too.

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Ah yes, the naval meme of the mid-late 1800s.

Some random designs from my playthroughs
Basically went for a total glass-cannon design. This particular one took two torpedoes and some gunnery fire and managed to limp into port with >99% flooding damage.
Basically an attempt to get 17" guns into service while keeping costs 'low'. Surprisingly useful.
I was desperate. It was terrible.

That's how I remember it going also.
Negative, it's currently at the very beginning of an engagement with Great Britain. I decided to keep it there until something like this thread popped up, to see if there was any interest in continuing it.
We kicked their ass before, with one major battle ending up with them losing six full-size battleships.
I believe that it was a 50-70% tech speed game, that ship was built in 1914.
My design, I've always allowed the torp tubes unless they put me over the tonnage limit. Not for standard engagements, but more as a coup-De-grace to crippled capitals so my main guns can target other things.

I think it ended up getting patched out in the most recent version.
Every game I've ran with Holla Forums has been set to Medium fleet size. With Large or Extra Large, the battles get much bigger.

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The problem was that the more of their obsolete battleships we killed, the more fresh construction they put on the line to replace them nearly as fast as we could knock them out, accounting for the dead time between wars. Meanwhile, we had one licensed battleship from America lined up and mostly a bunch of golden oldies otherwise. This conundrum plus the eternal thirst for more torpedo boats & destroyers, gallantly sacrificed to win back their tonnage one hundredfold, and some experimentation with utility cruisers/heavy destroyers.

If enough unique IDs show up of people from the old threads, I'd be interested to continue. We'd probably have to do a general naval review to refresh ourselves on what's what and where's where.

Otherwise, you could always just start anew. Maybe give some custom nation a try.

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I'd be interested in trying a game where we have arbitrary limits placed upon us to liven things up. Maybe make some sort of rollchart that gets rolled on every 5 years to decide what the rules are, and build our fleet around those limitations.

A doctrinal rollchart might be neat, though the game already does that to some degree with 'more X ships!' demands. Is five years a bit short for doctrinal shifts, though? The Kriegsmarine had that kind of see-sawing, with the need for a compromise between more subs and a modern surface flotilla to batter through the Home Fleet, eventually ending up with enough of neither due to the overreach of construction for Plan Z combined with delays to said overreaching construction followed by a swap back to sub focus, and the subsequent evaporation of the raiders that just weren't quite built right. Can't think of any others.

I recall another user Making Italy Relevant Again, too bad he stopped posting
Godspeed

You can increase the occurrence of those with bombastic head of state and inconsistent naval policy as national traits.
Actually the naval thinkers wanted to go full raider and submarine but a naval treaty signed with the UK required them to both obey tonnage limits and match the Royal Navy's distribution of tonnage per class (i.e. if the RN spent 10% of its treaty tonnage on Battleships the KM had to do so also).

nevr 5get

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Raeder was explicitly in favor of a decisive battleship engagement, wasn't he? At least in theory. It's neither the worst nor the best idea potentially, but much of his other thinking beside that was dodgy, brushing up. At least he had the sense to try for the two-pole plan once the war blew up in his face and he didn't have the ships needed for direct attrition, but the pocket ships simply weren't built fast enough. Had they gone more towards the D-Class from the get go- if not in the armor and increased tonnage, which might defeat the point of their treaty cheaty plausible stated weight, then in improved machinery and speed- they might have accomplished something.

Graf Zeppelin was weird. It was basically a barely-armored guncruiser that also had a flight deck, with slow aircraft elevators and ill-suited craft. The carrier 109s probably weren't the worst CAG craft ever devised, but they certainly weren't good, with all the wrong handling for landing at sea. I think they actually considered a navalized Stuka, which seems insane to me. A navalized Fw-190 would've probably been their best bet, accounting for timing if they decided to finish her. Assuming you don't end up with some naval code-luftwaffe code snafu fucking up the aircraft actually doing anything, Graf might've done some work on the North Sea as some strange raider-carrier, before having a bad time with a Q-ship and falling into a more conventional line of carrier action if she isn't destroyed. Whether she survives to the wars' end is another question.

Alphabet-year coding is a nice touch, I like that user. Both thematically and organizationally. I also like that that thing is a floating armory, even if it's not going to do spit against anything above BC if it isn't doing a risky torp run.

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God I bet a magazine explosion on that is like an atom bomb going off.

I believe this was one of our early battleships during the first Holla Forums plays.

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Inter-war German naval politics are a complicated beast, particularly once you factor in the Nazi focus on surface fleets (they really bought heavily into the 'submarines are for cowards' meme).

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Oh shit.

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The thing with RtW is that there's frankly a ton of information that you'd probably never know about if someone doesn't tell you. For example:
Also, I figure I might as well post the devs intro for new players:

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Most of that is in the manual user, which at only 20 pages long is pretty light for such a game.

Honestly, I assume that 90% of people don't read the manual to anything.

Fair enough, it's a shame too since RtW has a short and clear manual compared to the usual massive shitfest games like these have. If anything you can criticise it for being a bit too short.

Never heard of an anti-submarine sentiment in the Party, that's interesting.

Tell me, I'm always thirsting for more bits of info on these subjects and it's useful to bounce this back onto RtW gameplay itself- how does one 'fix' the Kriegsmarine, in a vacuum? The 'build more subs and nothing else' answer has always smacked of low-understanding dismissiveness flimsily backed by the concept of rather than actual hindsight. Obviously, one needs to avoid overbuilding, sort out the naval aviation issue by creating a dual-subordination-but-effectively-naval-command Luftwaffe subservice, and do more to avoid political & treaty bottlenecking. The question is how.

The Weimar pocket ships, the concept of which- build beyond conventional weight/class constraints, build dense- have stuck thoroughly in my mind as you know, seem like a good mold; their mistake of being too slow likewise. Other ships the Germans built like the Hipper having poor legs is also a concern they ought to have given more thought on. It seems to me that the answer is to never allow constraints of the like in the Anglo-German Naval Agreement to come into being to begin with, pursuing other angles of diplomacy & guarantee to assuage the British; after all, one might complain that such constraints would only introduce obvious limits and vulnerabilities against revanchist France, or based on the faulty predicted mid-'40s wartime, the eventual Soviet fleet.

And don't informally undergun the Hippers to match a treaty you aren't part of in the London Naval Treaty restriction of 8 inch cruiser guns to not be 'provocative.' Until the Czech partition, or a similar break between saying and doing, the Germans can effectively print political capital to burn with Britain and delay their full-bore rearmament, as a better, leaner Kriegsmarine that can fight Britain can be posed as not being intended to outside theory, while a fleet that won't do either serves no end at all and is mainly a means to dying valiantly.

The uninformed answer I have seems to be, without resorting to large breakthroughs like the electric-peroxide boats, in short;
>To accomplish these goals, aim for a true capital like the Scharnhorst earlier rather than having it develop out of bloating Panzerschiff, and build more of said Panzerschiff, with the D and P classes edging out the dubious Hipper and perhaps a single O class entering in place of some of the doomed Plan Z battleships. On the subject of the Deutschland class itself, build/retrofit fast or die slow. In general, go fuller bore on better and more reliable machinery, which the Germans were behind in with the Versailles development gap.

And finally, to dovetail back into Rule the Waves away from historical context, does this sort of thing work? Our sheer abuse of anachronistically aggressive torpedo runs to get our capital ship kills made it hard to tell in the Italy playthrough what our ship-to-ship merit really leveled out as, and even with futureproof building, a lot of the time those ships didn't get to punch down as envisioned anyways, and instead punched up. And we never had enough damned subs. Would we have been at greater advantage had we not been constrained as we were by Italian foibles, applying this ethic? Or do you just end up eating budget for fewer ships that aren't as disproportionately survivable as advertised?

I would love another RTW thread. those are always fun times.

Would Like heavily armored ships with smaller guns be good? Like a buncha armor and 11 inch guns.

Glass cannons are the most viable option with the way armor works in this game.
Small-caliber guns -> Have to close range to penetrate enemy with medium/heavy armor -> Your heavy armor is useless, plus they out-range you
The shell getting through is a Yes/No thing, it will always do the same amount of damage if it does. If you have armor, but the enemy is going to be able to penetrate it anyways, why have that armor in the first place.

Alright thanks.

this would be cool if you're interested, user

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It doesn't really work, even when the shells penetrate they just don't do enough damage. The problem is that RTW's damage mechanics are based entirely around a hidden "shell weight" stat, which scales irregularly:
2" 153" 154" 325" 636" 1087" 1728" 2769" 36510" 500 11" 66612" 86413" 120014" 137215" 168816" 204817" 300018" 3500
The big jump at 13" doesn't correspond to any similar jump in weight or ROF, so there's no benefit to using anything smaller once you've unlocked 13" guns.

Also ignore , even subpar armor has a chance of stopping shells if the enemy gets a bad roll. Enemies also get a major penetration penalty (seems to be around 25% at max AP tech) if they hit your belt at a shallow angle, although this won't help against turret or superstructure hits.

where do I pirate this game? cant find it anywhere

In what way does this invalidate what I said? If anything, it furthers my point; subpar armor can still stop shells. Kys, brainlet.

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a.doko.moe/mvjlzk.7z
Hope it's not an old version. It's from 2016.

Do oil ships make a difference compared to coal?

If I remember right, oil machinery is lighter and more reliable but you don't have the chance of coal bunkers eating shells.

Also no stokers to get tired.

Does anyone know what happens if you have a possession that produces oil, make oil-fired ships then lose that possession?

My best guess would be that those ships would still work and you could probably build more, but you'd be unable to design any other oil-fired ships until 1920.

Any idea how passthrough chance factors into this?

Guess I'll have to test it at some point.

Reminder that this exists now: >>>/vg/26797

Personally, I'm hesitant to move to another thread on a slower board. I originally started making RtW threads in hope of bringing it to more people's attention, whereas in a general thread it'd almost entirely be people who already play it. In addition, I find the group plays to be more fun when you have people who don't know the 'meta' of the game. You end up with fun stuff like this whereas veteran players tend to go for more standardized builds.

Personally I'm going to post on both anyway.

Though /vg/ just hit the front page apparently.

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For those interested where our Italian campaign from October left off, the Italian fleet was steaming between Sicily and Tunisia with the majority of our capitals. While our most modern Dreadnoughts 'Pizzeria Bella Napoli' and 'Grape' are in port somewhere, every other active capital Italy possesses in within this group.

Leading the formation is the CL Biggus Dickus Mk.II, one of our newest dedicated torpedo Cruisers. Several miles behind her, a trio of Destroyers escort the three most modern Italian Battle-cruisers, each packing a heavy armament of 15" guns, totaling a combined broadside of 29 full-sized guns. Behind and to starboard, a quartet of our heavy Armored Cruisers follow. The 'Giuseppe Garibaldi' sails alone, holding the distinction of being the oldest ship within this fleet. To her East, the 'La Famiglia' and two 'Minghia'-class CAs stick together, each possessing a complement of 10" guns.

Behind this vanguard, another pair of BCs make up the center of our formation. While they were the pride of the fleet in 1912, 32 years later they're certainly showing their age. The CLs in their wake aren't much younger, the newest having been built in 1920. Making up the rest of the rear section is the 'Chef Boyardee', 'Ave Caesar' and 'Napoli'. All three are old and slow, with 'Chef Boyardee' being the fastest at 23kts. Armament-wise, they're an entirely mixed bag. 'Ave Caesar' carries an antiquated set of 12" guns, while 'Chef Boyardee' packs an impressive set of eleven 14" guns arranged in four turrets. The oddest one out of the bunch has to be Napoli, a legacy pre-Dreadnought Battleship retrofitted to carry a pair of 16" guns. While she carries the largest calibre gun out of the entire fleet, she's got paper for armor and is P A I N F U L L Y slow, only able to reach a measly 18kts.

An unknown contact was spotted to the North, what course of action seems wisest? I have basically no idea what the war situation is looking like, I haven't looked at this save in 5 months.

Huh, I hadn't checked that, every time I've seen /vg/ it's been hovering at single to double digit postings.

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We should probably wait to make final decisions until a lot of anons have had a voice but it looks like we should get into a good range for the 14 guns so the 16 can fire too, Ave Caesar will just have to be a tank for now (if we get too close the Napoli will go up in smoke).
Apparently up to 83 now.

Holy shit that's a kitakami

Engage.

Let's see some action.

very nice
pls dont actually derail

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Nice digits user

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I don't think I've ever seen a rtw thread derail. Most everyone here is a quality poster.

It's a sizable digit, quints that is,so it could go either way
be happy it wasn't hexes or more,that's a guaranteed Fuck-your-thread

The Biggus Dickus turns back towards the main body of our fleet, but quickly begins taking heavy calibre fire, with several rounds hitting quite close and a pair striking the superstructure. As our BC line brings it's guns into position, the enemy ships are ID'd as being French. Apparently we're in a war with France, not Britain.

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Unpleasant if it isn't a misidentification; I don't recall who we were at war with it's been so long so I'm not sure if you're piss taking. As I recall, the French were building big and building modern.

Your memory serves you well. And unfortunately, it appears that someone on the French Admiralty knows how to aim a gun.

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The battle lines for our respective fleets begin to be drawn, each of us bringing a trio of BCs with smaller ships giving support from the back lines. Our outdated BCs manage to link up, as does one of theirs. 'I'll Grande Cazzo di Italia' begins taking an absolute beating, but a torpedo fired from 'Tiramisu' quickly manages to even the odds.

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Despite their age, the BCs 'Pax Romana' and 'Italia il Audace' begin landing multiple hits with each of their volleys. With the damage to the Rouen-class mounting, the French battle line begins to turn away. However, a fresh wave of Capitals appears on the horizon and 'I'll Grande Cazzo di Italia' has taken heavy damage. She's been reduced to a mere 8kts, with one of her turrets out of action.

With the enemy reinforcements inbound, should we stand and fight, or hope to trade 'I'll Grande Cazzo di Italia' for the Rouen-class?

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Following this by the way, just not really got anything to contribute splitting attention between two boards is annoying.

Cazzo di Italia, old or no, is a match for her contemporaries. She has more main guns than the Rouen and of only marginally smaller size in both batteries, and largely par armor at 11,000 odd tons lower; better long range, worse belt. That is not a trivial sacrifice to make, and fleeing in disgrace will neither guarantee the Rouen's destruction in trade nor the prevention of the rest of the fleet being run down by their battlecruisers, which by all means are capable of running down our older and even our modern ships.

Fight defensively, save the crippled Cazzo if it can be done, and extract the most damage from the enemy possible. Every prior success was written by grit and mettle in blood, with hyperaggressive torpedo tactics and the occasional fight to the last shell. Don't sacrifice the torpedo ships trivially by throwing them in front of the capitals before there is opportunity if they're not screening already, but do not hesitate to throw up the screen when the opportunity arises. Drown them in fish and force them to die or turn as soon as it can be done to advantage, and if the scattering wave doesn't sink home, use remaining fish to make precision runs or drown them again as the situation dictates.

As our BCs attempt to force the French line back, the reinforcing wing turns out to include Requin-classes. Italia il Audace takes a series of devastating hits to it's hull and waterline, taking on heavy water in a very short amount of time. Deciding that perhaps a fighting retreat is in order, our lighter ships begin to lay a smoke screen to facilitate linking up with the Dreadnoughts. The 'Pax Romana' takes several hits in a few short minutes, each heavily damaging and leaving her without power.

At this point, assuming the French fleet presses us, we face losing multiple, perhaps even three Capital ships. Should we follow 's advice and go full fledged on the aggressive torpedo tactics and hope our crippled capitals can limp back to port? It's roughly 2:30 in the afternoon, but as it's late September, we might be able to hold until the sun sets.

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It's coming back to me. The bastards learned the same lessons we did about the importance of a well-serviced main battery and its unsubtle application, except they had the consistent budget, revanchism and the sheer lack of shackling tonnage on the water- because we sank it all- to put them completely into practice. So they filled everything with maximum-class guns, with gigantic dual-purpose batteries and displacement to spare. What a mess.

Quite.

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REV UP THOSE TORPS

Current ship status:
Multiple (20+) hits to both the hull and superstructure. Bridge destroyed. Machinery damaged. Salt water flooded feed tanks. Current max speed of 2kts
Two turrets destroyed. Moderate flooding. All electrical power offline. Unable to move.
Heavy flooding. Forced to slow down to attempt emergency damage control.
Minor damage, linking up with 'Ave Caesar' and 'Chef Boyardee'
The Requins continue to push forward, as our screens do their best to fill the water between us with fish. At least one manages to hit it's target, although it's unclear what the damage will be.

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F
On the upside, 'I'll Grande Cazzo di Italia' is improving her situation. She's managed to limp to the edge of the French sightlines and improved her speed to about 7kts. 'Pax Romana' is in a similar situation. However, the rest of the our fleet is taking a beating and 'Toto Sapore''s rudder has jammed. The screens are doing their best though.

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End of a legend. Fought long, often above her weight class, and won all but once. It all comes down to whether the torpedoes can mortally wound a substantial portion of the enemy battleline with a couple or a few direct hits each, spitting in the face of the Requin class, its qualitative advantage, and what it stands for to the resurgent French. Which is to say, devouring us, because the name means 'shark.'

Unless we get a second chance at a cheeky night battle to cheap out mass torping them, and that mattering only if we do preserve our capitals, this is probably the do or die moment as to whether we can knock down the French for a peace and keep the navy intact enough for a final round with Britain for Gibraltar, assuming we can even try for it.

Luck turns to us just a bit, as the weather turns stormy and reduced visiblity somewhat. Our capitals manage to split up and return to ports with mostly success. The overall results are bad, but could have been much worse.

As usual, I'll post any individual ship's combat log if anyone wants it.

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That should have gone a lot worse, honestly.

We're not going to be able to catch up on numbers or quality at this point. Should we plow everything into destroyers and night training plus torpedo training?

Damage points dealt were nearly equal, but the sinking slants things. We didn't manage to outright destroy any of theirs that actually mattered. However, I should assume that those which suffered medium & heavy damage on our side were the least modern, and on theirs the most modern save the one Rouen, as the Requin had come forward into our torpedo net.

I'm also to assume that they have a huge submarine and production advantage just as before. That means we have a narrow window to achieve one of two scenarios before a decisive battle or attrition kills us; an advantaged line battle in which the most modern ships we have, which were at port for this engagement, will be leveled against theirs, pin them down, and allow for them to be torpedoed, praying that the same won't happen to us. Or alternatively as motions towards, torpedo the bastards in the dead of night.

We can't possibly gain a capital ship advantage save by destruction, and quality is not a gap we'll close save by destroying everything they have on the water above CA class, prompting a new French regeneration. An emergency program to construct additional destroyers, minesweepers, submarines and motor torpedo groups is in order, suspending any other construction as necessary if the war isn't likely to drag on long enough for them to be completed in time, even if we drag on by denying engagements.

If necessary, the development of new 'ideal' mass production screen(s) wouldn't be unwise. We've built pseudo-torpedo boat destroyers in the distant past, and we may or may not have built heavy destroyers/recon cruisers, I can't recall. We ought to look into a middleweight pocket Kitakami, and a better one than whatever we may already have that fits the discription. Too small to generally hit, rough enough to withstand getting winged by French BC secondaries once or twice, and loaded down with torpedoes & engines and only as much gun as will fit beside them that they might pursue and destroy anything and exact a thousand times their tonnage.

So then, it appears we actually are at war with Great Britain, as they're in an alliance with France. Thankfully, we've got a similar agreement with Germany. While this means we've got to dear with a force considerably larger, it does mean a favorable peace treaty could result in us having uncontested domination of the Mediterranean.

With the loss of 'Italia il Audace', our budget has freed up considerably. While it's highly unlikely that any capital ship would be complete by wars end, we could spend the excess budget on refilling our Destroyer forces, refitting other ships or investing heavily in submarine warfare.

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Destroyer spam is probably our best bet. We're still up 18,000 VP though and the war has already been going on for 2 years, has there been any mention of peace negotiations or unrest in other countries?

A max size DD with a focus on torpedoes and speed would come out like this. With an accelerated construction, they'd take about or under a year to construct.

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Breddy good. How many could we make? Do we have torpedo training?

Rounding the build cost up to half a million for simplicity's sake and we could put about 26, more than our entire DD fleet, into production. Assume then we put at least half into rushed production and allow our surplus to eat the costs.

It looks like our current destroyers are rather small and dated. It'd probably be good to supplant them with something more effective.

I've gone ahead and requested 25 built. Of course, that means we need names. Seeing as how many we need, anything and any amount you've got goes. To answer the earlier question, our training doctrines currently focus on Torpedoes and Gunnery. Also of note, we've got 20 submarines, a mix of Coastal and mid-range, in construction.

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...

Yes, please do another campaign.

Scipio Halfricanus
Titus Minius
Lucius Cornelius Smalla

Oh bugger.

This torpedoed ship was likely a misidentified BC, as France has no Dreadnoughts according to all other sources. Also, I just realized the US is part of our alliance. So it's Axis+US vs. France+UK

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Time to die

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Our forces are rather subdued in comparison to the last battle. While patroling the northern coast of Sicily, a French cruiser is spotted approaching from the North. Our BCs are in a perfect position to fire, and 'I'll Grande Cazzo di Italia' lands a pair of hits at 20,000m. Those are quickly followed up by several others, and even as a smaller cruiser approaches, the Charner-class begins to slow.

Now, the question is: Is this the scouting element of a larger force, or the entirety of a small raid?

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Send some Cls or DDs as scouts to see if there's anything else out there.

Enemy presence seems light and it looks like this should be eas-uh oh.

Round two?

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It's absolutely a scouting force and dusk is too far away to play games. Put a few more shells into it and bounce.

The enemy ships appear to include three BCs of roughly equivalent strength. If we pull into harbor our coastal assets are forfeit, but we appear rather outgunned.

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Time to run.

I'm going to mirror the other user. We should not look to engage unless forced; engagement at range means we'll be picked apart, engagement in close means we'll go up like torches. It pains me, but it was stupid not to give greater regard to these disproportionate damage scalings. The French have us beat without contest in the gun battle, so all that we have left are two things; torpedoes, and the logical inversion implied by my 'engage to advantage!' ideology & strategy- don't engage at disadvantage. It hasn't been until now that we've really met a disadvantage that couldn't be turned around, but here we are.

Coastal assets are going to be just a drop of VP in the bucket I assume. There's no sense sacrificing ships of the line when the enemy can stove our heads in without effort if engaged conventionally; that's how we made the progress we made against the AI earlier in the save. We'll just have to eat the cost to not choke on a bigger one.

I'm worried about the size of the Mighty Faggot Mk. V; there's nothing to be done now, but I feel in the current environment that this sort of maximum destroyer is doomed to get itself pinholed too early to get more than one run of fish in the water, being large enough to lose out on agility and fail to fit between the dispersion of enemy shells. Though, historically, destroyers did bloat past to up to twice this displacement, and they are intended as sacrificial lambs anyways. What was the maximum of our previous designs? 800~ displacement? 1000? We'll manage regardless. Do we have any budget to spare for subs, sweeps & MTGs to supplement the fleet torpedo ship lineup?

While the French gunners find their range, our escorts make busy filling the sea with their torpedoes to cover the retreat. The entirety of our controlled fleet makes it back safely. With the sea uncontested, the French make busy hunting for coastal ships, merchants and the like. CL 'Spaghetti Hauler', having been regulated to coastal patrol (AI Control), is caught out and sunk. Even with all of those losses, the 11,000t French cruiser makes up for them pointswise.

Our original MF ships had the opposite problem, they were 400t and as a result, would sink the moment anything greater than 3" looked at them funny. The second gen were 600t, 3rd gen 900t and the 4th gen 1400t. They've basically evolved from entirely disposible to more standard DDs This is more as a result of us being 20 years past the 'end' of the game.
Currently we've got 25 DDs and 20 subs in production. We could push the budget further, since we're only running a moderate defecit and we've got a decent stash of funds.

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'Toto Sapore' catches and quickly dispatches a French raider. And it looks like the French/Brit alliance would like to spend Christmas at home, rather than the bottom of the sea.

Y/N?

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Probably for the best.

Those merchants getting destroyed is leading directly to those steel shortages and others, isn't it? This is not good. If we have to pussyfoot around to avoid losing ships, the emergency DDs won't finish in time to begin with thanks to merchant raiding. If we throw ourselves into it to hope for a win and prevent delays, we'll lose the war or suffer revolution in an instant.

I would highly advise that we push the budget. The current deficit balance of -546,584, assuming no further one-month delays on destroyers, will total at 7,105,592 pounds reduction to our war chest. That's 13% of our war chest, and costs can only go down once they're in maintenance rather than construction. Considering this IS the round two with Britain, the second great war, and currently a war of annihilation with France's navy, nothing that will not crash the economy outright or cause revolution is too much. If I recall, we never used our war chests to the fullest and always let them get snatched out from under our noses at the wars' end by being overefficient penny-pinchers. Double our production; the same weight/cost we're putting out in fleet torpedo destroyers needs to go into mass runs of our auxiliary ships, minesweepers to blunt the French sub fleet, subs & motorboats to hopefully cut their capitals to pieces offscreen. The new sweeps need to be decently armed and to have minelaying equipment if possible, without bloating to colonial gunboat sizes unless absolutely necessary, though gunboats would not be unwise to have, considering our tonnage obligations.

Yes, I remember the 400t pseudo-torpedo boats. I was the one that suggested them. It was less than wise in retrospect, but who was to know that the smaller destroyers would sink on the first shot AND be too unagile compared to true MTBs to avoid them?

I'm very leery of this. We just started massive production. If we peace out now, with 'minor victory' under our belt, there's no way in hell we'll leverage Gibraltar out of them, the war chest and budget will be ripped out from under our noses, and suddenly we won't have the funding to create the weapons to kill them in either this war or the next. Peace is not an option; they'll resume massively outbuilding us and our alliances will expire, and we'll be left with our at present dead-in-the-water BC fleet that we can hardly afford to scrap and can't afford to keep, while having scarce retrofit options. We'll continue on with a phony war denying engagements if necessary, but we must have a war, or we won't survive the next one. No peace.

Shall I assume our response here is to quietly leave?

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Very, very quietly. The appearance of our BBs would make things tempting, but as I recall, they had only modest advantages over the Rouen & Requin in armor and none in armament, which will not make up the difference if our BC line is also brought in. As it is a cruiser battle, this is simply not likely enough to risk.

Estimates on DD expenditure-equivalent auxiliary mass production? With subs being 2/3 medium range/oceangoers- I'm sure they have to have more stat advantages than just range over coastals, so unless coastals are really cheap comparatively on funds or time I'm eager to move past them- and the other third minelayers in proportion of individual ships; minesweepers 3/4s conventional two hundred tonners in proportion of weight and the last fourth in tonnage devoted to larger minelayer gunboats. Motor torpedo groups don't have variants as far as I know, they're not well-documented. Evenish proportion of funding overall to the three auxiliary classes.

Estonia encounters another French CL. We're nearly equally matched, it'll come down to gunnery skill to decide who walks away from this fight.

I've added some MS/AMCs to meet your specifications, but the submarines were put into production last time we played, so I don't remember the justification. As it stands, we're really only fighting France, as the UK is tied up trying to hold the US off of the Eastern Canadian territories while fighting Germany in her home waters.

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Oh hey I named that ship. Good night, you jolly crew of well-paid waste management professionals.

I believe the justification was, 'holy bologna we're going to get our shit pushed in in a line battle so we need to fight dirty or die, also the french are already doing the same themselves.' Considering how things have played out since resuming, I believe there is a strong case for an emergency DD program-tier expansion to our sub production, to actually make use of our war chest. And yes, Britain may be preoccupied, but I don't recall if separate peace is possible and there's every possibility she could pull through enough to start interfering in the Med if America or Germany drop the ball offscreen.

Also, unless nobody has decided to talk about or document them on the forums since 2015 or so, cursory research revealed that I'm an idiot and motor torpedo boats are a dead-end dummied out tech that does nothing. If I happen to refer to them again, remind me that I am stupid and mentally filter it to 'coastal sub,' because frankly that's what they were going to act in the role of anyways in gameplay.

I would note that the Chateaurenault has a modest broadside advantage of one gun and likewise in retreat, and superior torpedo armament in every way. I'd also note that she is entirely inferior in pursuit at two guns to five and that her double turrets' superiority won't mean squat when five single turrets are ranging her in and picking her apart as she tries to chase us with only one to fore. So if it comes to us turning away, make sure we keep her in range to get popped on and she'll suffer miserably, unless her one double gets real lucky.

Both 'Estonia' and the Chateaurenault land a hit on one another before the Chat decides it'd rather go home. Thankfully next month 'La Famigila' catches an AMC and sinks it with a single 10" to the waterline.

With that being said, the French submarine and minelaying menace is rising.

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The Napoli is a propaganda loss, but at a tonnage lesser than some of our armored cruisers and a maintenance expensive nominal-Dreadnought status, strategically this just means lots of new budget for us. Budget for submarine and anti-submarine warfare investment. Hint hint.

What did she accomplish in her career, anyways? Wasn't she a rather constrained legacy ship, an albatross around our neck past the early game? With hindsight, I feel stupid for being one of the starkest advocates for keeping anything that we can on the water to prevent a numbers gap. It hurt our modernization even with futureproofing, successful or otherwise.

Situation is deteriorating. The British have decided that victory in the Mediterranean is more important than holding overseas possessions, and has thus moved most of their American fleet into our waters. Our blockade on France has now been reversed and is on us. Submarines continue to wreck havoc.

It always hurts to lose one of your favorites.

All attempts to push out DDs, Subs and CP ships are underway, but massive rolling delays is impacting our efforts. The Napoli was a pretty decent early game battleship, and later in her career (1916 onward) served as a heavy coastal defense ship armed with an experimental armament of 16" guns.

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That is not a happy balance deficit. Unless these delays cease, the offscreen simulation starts handing our allies victories as the severe British overreach should dictate, or frankly both, the situation is hopeless, because Britain decided to commit potential suicide in the Atlantic to spite us. At the very least the unrest level isn't critical, but that could change quickly.

Y/N?

While I'm not 100% certain, I believe we get a partial refund when ships are delayed. We've been running a deficit, but our treasury has grown.

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Convoy Defense means those are probably BCs.

Let's give it a try.

Addendum, after consulting the manual; accelerated construction doesn't just increase cost, it causes delays to other ships at random. Attempting to prioritize the construction of a lead set of ships, let alone accelerating all of them at once as we've done, will and has only resulted in all of them being universally delayed by bureaucratic havoc. Since the ships would've taken a year anyways, that means we would've saved only one month if it had even worked, and it hasn't. The acceleration of everything is only making the ships take collectively and individually longer.

We've pulled a fucking Elektroboot-tier debacle out of our asses and tried to shit out a state of the art vessel using bunk contractors for modest and purely theoretic savings. We need to halt all acceleration; the theoretical 10% boost to speed has resulted in multiple ships delayed by up to a year or so it looks, when a year was all they were supposed to take. All of them have undoubtedly been delayed at least once. We'll never get anything out with this nominal acceleration causing mistakes. Rein in, cut actual rather than theoretic costs, and get the production rolling again.

They have no screens of note. They have four destroyers and two minesweepers. Either it's going to be this handful of screens showing up, which we will destroy handily, or battleships are on the horizon because they've almost nothing else to bring in.

Their dreadnoughts may or may not be superior to ours pending review, and certainly are going to be superior to our battlecruisers, but we have almost a score of DDs and CLs to sink the rat bastards. We have to take this risk. We have to kill the bastards now and cause a knock-on effect to the Franco-British war effort, such that our allies can pull their weight and pull through.

It appears that this battle is going to be composed of DDs plinking at one another. Theirs carry heavier guns, but we outnumber them substantially.

Well shit, I managed to miss that.

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I thought for a moment that you'd gone with the inadvisable acceleration to be in keeping with the frantic mood and make the drama. I'm surprised that wasn't the case. It's May now, they would've been four months from universally deploying at this time without this debacle. I'm kicking myself for not looking up the ramifications of acceleration & cause of delays earlier. We could've won this securely, and now it is a very unsure thing.

Hopefully the present numbers advantage will let us drown them in shot & fish before their marginal gun count & diameter can make a difference. And hopefully a dreadnought will lurk out of the mist to get critically isolated.

The power of the British 4" guns is making itself know, as they outrange our 3" counterparts considerably. While we're trying to keep the merchants safe, a quartet of shells hits 'Artigliere' hard, leaving her dead in the water. While she does manage to start her engines up again, it's questionable if she'll be able to make it out safely. The Mighty Faggot Mk.IV design suffers here somewhat, as it's sparse armament is front facing, leaving it defenseless in a retreating manner. Thankfully, the British seem unwilling to force the fight, and back off as night approaches. And look, friendly MTBs! Merchants arrive safely and we claim a minor win.

But it looks like we're gonna be forced into a large Cruiser battle.

Never underestimate my ability to miss things.

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That's humiliating that we couldn't even close to scratch them. It's good that the Mk. V will rectify both the caliber and placement problems; once the emergency fleet comes into being we should frankly relegate the Mk. IV to ASW duty, where it will hopefully pull more weight.

Hopefully this doesn't become a capital battle in disguise, or if it does it involves our BB against their BCs. If not one of these worst and less-worst scenarios, it'll be CAs against CLs, which is firmly in our advantage unless they can mimic one of our torpedo runs.

It appears to be a trio of CLs, primarily armed with 6" guns. As our CAs carry 10" and our CLs match their armament, we've got them easily outgunned. The Brits split up and flee, with a group of our CLs chasing down the Galilee and our CAs hammering the Laubat.

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Two of the French CLs are dispatched handily. On the strategic scale 'Grape' is put of of action for a while and we lose a CL of our own. That being said, we do manage a good month in hunting down British subs. Now, a medium Convoy Attack could be anything from a group of DDs to a small BC raiding force, what shall we do?

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The enemy has friendly ports in close and seemingly superior odds of getting the capitals they need than we do. I don't particularly trust it, or the VPs we'd lose gambling on a freak friendly BB and abandoning the convoy if it turns out to be impossible versus the small loss in denying engagement.

We choose not to fight the battle. The subs begin to roll of the production line, as does the first of our DDs and MSs, which will go a long way in enhancing our defensive and offensive capabilities. Unrest, however, has reached up to 9. A small force of ours does encounter the rather odd sight of a lone British DD off the coast of Albania, though.

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The DD goes down easily enough. Now, how to handle the enemy within our gates?

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Inspired speech or announcement. We will insta-lose to revolution if we send the marines, I am sure of that. I recall the speech working when we used it previously, but that might be a fluke. Improving living conditions will probably bite us in the ass, because we're about to roll out the emergency ships that will be anything but improved.

Unrelatedly, I will motion as rabidly as before that we go to fleet support warfare policy, as attempting to wage a trade war while under blockade is more or less useless with sub numbers out of our favor. We need to get freak warship kills and fast.

Unrest quiets slightly, and our budget, while reduced somewhat, is stable enough since we just got a dozen or so subs out of production. Anyways, in what comes as a bizarre surprise, 'Toto Sapore' finds a Frenchman at extremely close range. Also she can't move.

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Ah, that'd explain it. Thankfully, the French decided to forego adding torpedo tubes to their AMCs, otherwise this could have turned bad very quickly. Now, if we'd like, we could try and knock the British out of the Mediterranean in one fell swoop. Y/N?

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Y

I hope that we decided to add torps to our own AMCs, as this sounds very exploitable. I didn't even realize they were designable ships beyond battery complement until now.

Put the boots to them.

Sadly the Brits don't take the challenge. However, we have a chance to take a small colonial engagement.

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We can probably outrun the battleship if we happen to run into it. I'd go for it.

Although the Brits refuse to meet us again, they do accept a similar engagement next turn. Interestingly enough, it appears one of our submarines is lurking directly outside their port.

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That could make for an interesting development if the enemy makes for the port. I am rather concerned about the British submarines. How many of them do they have? Are they suffering a net loss at the least with our ASW efforts?

Night falls before our CA can reach the target, this could be a good thing or a bad thing. Just as the target comes into view, so does another ship. Before Mario Mario can take evasive action, a torpedo hits her port side.

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OOF

The British ships, perhaps unaware of the damage they've inflicted, flee into the night. 'Mario Mario's crew halts all operations in an attempt to contain the flooding and at barely manages to save the ship for now. At this point it's uncertain that she'll be able to make it back to port, should she Ten-Go into the objective in an attempt to make up her likely loss, or head South and hope to make it back?

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If she Ten-Go's she might be destroyed. If she doesn't, she might also be destroyed simply by sinking. Either the British will turn and sink her or we'll be able to hound them a while longer, if the flooding doesn't get us first. The ideal scenario is the complete stop of flooding, the destruction of some enemy asset, and a limp home. The important thing in my mind is keeping the simulation running long enough for that sub to potentially do its job, assuming they're fleeing to port themselves, whatever we do.

Limp back to port and cut our losses.

As 'Mario Mario' limps onward, torpedoes are spotted passing by. Within minutes, she's once again surrounded. While she manages to dodge further torpedoes, at this range the DDs moderately strong guns (5") still hurt, and she's on the brink of death.

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We would've been caught regardless with this arrangement. If I'm not looking at this wrong, we would've driven straight into the on retreat. On that note, drive straight into them. Bow-on to reduce the damage we're taking, forcing them to fire at our tough turrets & conning tower instead of pelting the weak belt armor. Outright ram one of them if necessary and possible. We're going to take something with us if at all possible.

I'm afraid I have no good news to report.

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That's the way it goes for Italy.

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Apolgies for the wait, a friend wanted to play some other vidya.

Our strategic troubles continue, but 'Toto Sapore' continues to encounter raiders. This time, it's a large British CA, almost rivaling a BC. 10 sets of 10" guns certainly makes for a good fireworks display. My heart skipped a beat as I thought it was us flashfiring. Our light forces have started filling out well, also.

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Jesus, it's already 1946? These timeskips are throwing me off. It's troubling that the newest ships are still at poor crew quality, but I suppose they'll work up. Even with the ridiculous rolling delays caused by production 'acceleration,' it is pleasing to see that our next-newest lemon of a DD is now matched in number by a marginally heavier, superior vessel, and will soon be eclipsed by them along with the rest of our long-neglected screens as production comes back into order. And hopefully having more ships in general will provide enough filler to stop CAs & BCs from getting torpedoed in favor of DDs.

When I decide to embark on the autism of RtW on my own, I'm never going to even think of touching the acceleration button. Version 1.22 apparently 'much reduced' the chance for delays all the way back in 2015; I shudder to think what it was like before. It also goes on to say that 'this risk is related to the proportion of ships that are accelerated,' which is probably why we got fucked so hard that ships had accumulated extra build time multiple months longer than the actual man-hours to construct the class, even after stopping acceleration; it boggles the mind how that works.

A sudden convoy defense turns out similar to the last DD duel we had. This time however, there's only 1 British DD to our 5. The Faggots fall upon the British DD and fill it with 3" shells and torpedoes. At least we get this small victo-

Fuck.

We had about 20 ships on 'accelerated', which I've never done before. Timeskips are usually due to

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having to turn down blatantly bad fights, or enemies doing the same.

Will wonders never cease?

Speaking of CLs, the Bersagliere-class hasn't been updated since 1915. This refit would enhance her capabilities in all aspects, although she still wouldn't been queen of the seas. Also, these odds look somewhat workable, although not great. Orders?

IIRC, Bari was regulated to coastal patrol. So she probably spawned nearby during this action.

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Capital parity and a destroyer disadvantage, let's pass.

I approve of the refit. We should probably apply it to those ships that are indisposed for repairs anyways before those which are out in the field, if that's possible to do. If I'm not mistaken, the Bersagliere was always a bit of a forgotten lame duck even amongst the screens as we chased after an 'ideal capital' and consumed ourselves in those building projects, depending on decent battery & speed on screens as-designed and then depending on the fact that they're a boat with torpedoes attached to carry them the rest of the way. Doctrine soared ahead, while equipment lagged behind.

The screen disadvantage is a bit intimidating. We know the British have some advantages over us, but what do the French screens look like at this juncture?

Sorry to be that guy but…

This seems like a really cool game. I don't use steam but I do end up buying games I like. I'll buy this one if it is good. Before that however is there a good demo or torrent link?
What is the latest version? I have found some links already…

Sorry for the spoon feeding request, I guess I am highly impatient to play something and google is shitting me to tears. I'll be downloading something but I figure a link might be good in general for this thread.

More ho-hum bullshit. Think the Brits will fight us?

These numbers are a bit deceptive, since roughly half or more of our DDs are either in coastal duties or are working up. The Brits appear to be investing wholeheartedly in Battlecruisers. They've got three Incomparable-classes in construction, although they seem roughly equal to the Inflexible-classes.

Try the /vg/ thread, I think theres a link there. And it's not on Steam, the only way to buy it is direct from the dev.

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Cheers mate for your prompt reply.

I was more thinking the DD designs themselves.

They sure as shit won't, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Anything that looks like a recipe for giving them the fish we have to try and take. It's how we got this far.

Oh shit, it looks like we've finally got a finally got a fleet battle, and what's more we've got pretty much our entire capital fle-wait.

B DANTE ALIGHIERI
Someone has some explaining to do.

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Well I found these links

Game: mega.nz/#!tJUizbrK!sOFOaHtXCtusbZvNkXl-XUxbMZoYlnUGQ2vlpl_wchc

Patch: navalwarfare.net/files/SAI/RTW_134b1_Update.exe

Can't see the rego keys though at all :/

I guess I'll just come back to it later. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction though. I may check other torrents.

What. Are things so desperate? Isn't she the sister ship of the similarly useless Napoli? Or was she a later entrant?

In any case, how unfavorably do we compare, beside 'totally outmatched' with their sixteen inch guns for most of our capitals? Needless to say, everything comes down to successfully maneuvering for a torpedo run and not getting halfway to murdered as we did against the French.

I think that in the last thread before the hiatus I worked out a narrow range band in which they would be unable to penetrate both our deck armor and our angled belt. I have no idea what that range band is now. Cross fingers that we bumble into it.

Currently, our forces are split into two primary groups.

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They have to have more ships out there but we gotta gamble sometime and we have more hulls than they do. Stick it in.

V I N C E R E

One minute has passed since last post. Good shot Chef

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wew

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You fuckers, we've fought you in only two wars, which means you've fought all of two wars that matter, maybe only these two wars ever. And that means you've still got cordite in your god damn walkways in a fleet of nothing but battlecruisers! Eat shit!

The Southern force is doing what it can to cut off the British retreat, although Caesar's Palace has been taking a rather lot of punishment. While she's still combat worthy, we'll rotate her to the rear of the group and hope no further harm comes to her. Our flanking DD force discovers something worrisome though…

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Oh, joy, they've another full group. Pray for more flash fires. And for waterline hits. Their waterlines, to clarify. They have the better guns, but we have the advantage of not going up in flames on the first solid turret hit. We can end them, perhaps before the fish even hit the water, if RNGesus favors us even a little bit; the sheer number of double turrets on the Incomparable makes it seem like up to half the deck of their similar battlecruisers & battleships is occupied by instant death hitboxes, waiting to get popped right open by plunging fire long before the same takes our structure points apart. We just need to find that ideal range band. Do you happen to remember the penetration rules for gun calibers?

Biggus Dickus manages to not only cut across the British BC line, but also to sink a torpedo into one of them. Oh, and goodness me there goes another Inflexible. Chef is really putting up the numbers today Smelling blood, Biggus Dickus goes in for a point blank torpedo run. While the Identity of the new encroaching ships is still unknown, it's looking alot like another battle line.

Assuming British 16" guns are the same as ours, here is their pen quality.

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Sorry, meant to post this one.

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What a nice day.

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Biggus Dickus scores a devestating trio of hits with her torpedo run. Then, perhaps to show that not even Varka could hope to take her massive cock, she lands an improbable angled fish into the Incomparable. The fresh British ships, Dreadnoughts, include among them a Benbow-class. If we assume the remaining ships are the rest of Britain's dreadnoughts, they'll be much harder to sink, with 12-13in belt armor.

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There's the magic ranges, then. With a bit of angling, varying distances between 15 and 20,000 meters will allow our battlecruisers & battleships to weather the storm of 16 inch fire, usually just one type unless bow/stern-on but sometimes both lateral and plunging fire in the case of the Grape and presumably other BBs. Unfortunately, I imagine the enemy- although they are lighter on armor than our battlecruisers, which if I recall are generally constructed to 12 inches belt as what I think is the maximum before you get classed as a BB versus the 9 1/2 inch Incredible- are quite likely to weather our guns also. So this is mostly useful from a defensive standpoint, if we need to run straight away from the enemy and wait for nightfall at just the right distance to not get plunged.

Holy shit it's only been 21 minutes, I'd hoped we'd be closer to dark by the time the second group makes itself known.

Only two capitals means we might have mauled the first group badly enough to be able to gobble them up too, how's our line doing?

The British Dreadnoughts aren't within visual range of our Northern capital fleet yet, and our light forces are currently shredding the Battlecruisers apart, while laying heavy smoke to keep our own capitals safe. At this point, it may be worth asking if we dump the rest of our fish into the BCs and call it a day, or save some and try to take the Dreadnoughts also?

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If our line's reasonably healthy let's go for broke, it's 1946.

And here's enemies with a credible belt. I should think our hope will be to disable or destroy their turrets, thus flash firing the shit out of them, before they can tear us up or otherwise even things out with their higher barrel count. At 20k we can pen their belt with our best ships; unfortunately they'd do the same. At any range we'll rip their belt apart unangled, but they're sure as shit not going to show themselves unangled. We need to fence with them, fight defensively, and if we can't get the flash fire, tear them up with screens just as before.

If we can pull this off, I imagine the Anglo-French alliance in universe is going to go up i flames over British fecklessness and French failure to support with their own screens. We'll have the war won in an engagement, whether the peace comes soon or late, as in destroying the capital ships we'll be reversing the blockade and making French unassailability on the battle line irrelevant first by political means through the resumption of our ability to pick engagements as we please and militarily as our screens come back into their own.

The battlecruisers are practically all sinking messes already, aren't they? Put them the rest of the way under, but save fish for the big lads so that we can hopefully put them out of the battle line even for the rest of the campaign season if we can't sink them to the bottom.

While the British Dreads chase after a pair of DDs, we retreat our light forces to save their ammunition. Remarkably, despite taking a good 3 torpedoes each, the British BCs appear to still be in reasonable fighting shape. That doesn't last too long, and they begin to slow in the water. However, time to celebrate will be short, as the Dreadnoughts finally decide to make their appearence and begin steaming South.

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We'll have to hope the slowing BCs don't remain viable firing platforms, and don't effect enough damage control to avoid a good number sinking, or this could be bad. How far is nightfall, if we need to make a clean break?

At least one of the BCs is still firing quite well, as evidenced here. Grape just took a bad series of hits, but we can still work ourselves out from between these two hard places by turning our battle line to the East. Actually, with the rate damage is accumulating, we're going to have to go in with the screens now rather than later.

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Go in and get out, then. Our resolve in the postbattle should be to skim the logs and determine the number of fish to ensure a kill, and not try to spread them thin in the future; this was a mistake based on my hazy recollection of the decisiveness of torpedo attacks, back when the ships we were sinking were of lesser displacement and surplus flotation.

With our screens dumping their torpedoes at the enemy line, at least one mangages to strike home. Grape manages to restore her power and our main force begins heading for the Albanian coast as the screens we held in reserve move forward to try and asses the damage. The Collingwood is quickly swamped with torpedoes, and one of our Might Faggots V manages to hit the Victorious before getting shot down by it's defensive armament.

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Forgive me for this sparse update, but I'm pretty tired and am going to bed. I think the results speak for themselves. Of worth mentioning is that the BC torpedoed by our sub likely would have escaped otherwise.

No, I have no idea why Britain did this "no escorts" offensive again. I can only suspect that it's a result of us playing past the endgame. Anyways, as usual, I'll post any combat logs requested.

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What a beautiful day. Did Biggus Dickus survive?

Yes, although her sister ship was unable to make it back to port before flooding overtook the damage control.

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What heroes. Thanks for running this again.

I'm going to be frank and say I didn't expect us to get away with it quite this well. I thought we'd get heavy damage on the BBs and sink a good proportion of the BCs, certainly. But not sink two thirds of the entire force, and a third of that two-thirds portion being dreadnoughts. Let's take a look at the principal capital ships, Chef Boyardee, Grape, any others that stand out as dealing disproportionate damage, and the escorts that sealed Bongistani fate with torpedoes. We've replicated the first war, and I have to wonder in just how similar a fashion. Once this is all done, it might be interesting to check on similarities between these fateful engagements with the British, if you've organized screenshots well enough for it to be reasonable to try.

Meta reason, no relation to gameplay; the British were operating as if this was a coherent coalition war and expected French support, which they did not receive for one dysfunction or another. Gameplay reason; they earlier in 1946 have a grand total of fifteen destroyers to allocate between the far Atlantic front, the North Sea, and the Med, which must also be put into ASW duty. And all of four light cruisers.

The British seemingly neglected their screens even worse than we did, potentially expecting to be able to concentrate their forces to at most two fronts just as we expect to do all our prime fighting in one, with sideshows in the Indian Ocean and West Africa. This was necessary in order to rebuild the capital fleet that we single-handedly scuttled, and to build it to such a state where they could defeat any power barring exceptional circumstances. A quintuple-power war 3:2 out of their favor in participants and par in initial tonnage probably counts as 'exceptional circumstances.'

The AI, assuming it's smart enough to make strategic decisions and didn't swing our way to shit on the player nation, and that in addition to being smart enough to learn design ethics by playthrough to build counter-ships if I'm not mistaken, likely saw the borderline stalemate with France, and had some inkling of our emergency destroyer program. It would then correctly ascertain, based on the save file history of torpedo-heavy destroyers being decisively effective tools that blunted capital ship advantage (which probably influenced the gigantic often near-maximal 6 inch secondary batteries we've seen on all modern capitals) that it either had to screw us right now with an unbreakable blockade & subsequent destruction of our battleships or watch the French get swarmed by fish later in similar fashion to what they received, once we built an escort advantage capable of overcoming them.

Lucky for us, the British battlecruisers & dreadnoughts are flash fire prone turret farms and they repeated their mistake of assumed invincibility, albeit in a different fashion, and foisted themselves into our waiting maws again. The French dreadnoughts remain intimidating unlike these cordite tigers, as the Rouen has a meaningful belt and no flash-fire, while the Requin has three quad turrets of murderous guns. We might still triumph over the French militarily and not merely politically if we can continue our screens-and-sub emergency policy without further hiccups, such that we stop rampant Anglo-French torpedoing of Italian vessels and impose similar strife on them. Whether that's necessary is another thing. Gibraltar is looking rather realistic as a war spoil at the moment, and last I checked we bullied France out of most or all of her colonies anyways. But there's always the possibility to lever this huge advantage towards an action in India; while we can't claim the jewel of the Empire by VPs, army action in the absence of any true resistance is another thing entirely.

I can never do great at this game. Any tips?

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Pictured is the British Capitals that got away and the immediate aftermath on the world map. Despite this immense victory, our unrest level did not drop as a result.

What tends to screw you hardest?

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I just feel a bit out of my depth in all. I dont know when to build what or what techs to go towards. Also the general positioning of naval battles. I'm aware that 'crossing the T' is considered good, but from my WoWS days I recall that inviting plenty of penetrating hits versus, say, having your bow pointed 30 degrees off the enemy ship and maximizing bounces.

Hmm, I can't say much on WoWS, but I can help you with the more strategic scale.
All reduce weights of their respective components. Historically, different armor constructions gave much more effective protection, here it's abstracted by just reducing the weight.
Improves accuracy
Improves damage resistance, torpedo protection and flood control.
ROF improvements, triple/quad mountings
Allows access to superimposed turrets, additional centerline turrets, wings turrets, ect. Also has some weight savings later on
Improves penetration of shells
Mostly allows for larger DDs and improved torpedo mounts
Improves range, speed and damage of torps
Allows the building of and improvement of subs
Anti-sub tech, Q-ships
Improves shell damage, as well as giving access to SAP ammo
Mixed bag, see image
Allows access to and improvement of guns

In general, max the research budget and set guns to high priority. Since subs don't exist at the start of the game, I sometimes set ASW to low, as well as Explosive shells usually.
In general, I like to have a Capital ship in production or about to be in production fairly regularly. Have a small complement of CAs, and roughly double that of CLs. A well sized DD force is vital and MSs can save you from some event losses. AMCs are iffy, I wouldn't bother with them for now. Could you post a few of your designs? That might help figure out what might be going wrong.
I've not played WoWS, but isn't it usually more of a 1v1 scenario? Fleet tactics usually demand the maximization of firepower. While you could design ships based around a forward attack, you'd probably run into problems having access to the needed tech early on. In the 1920's we considered building a Dreadnought designed to charge the British battle line, using a sloped deck to layer our armor. It was ultimately abandoned in favor of light forces, but it could be possible to design a fleet around such a tactic.

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Why was it abandoned? You'd think that with an 'all or nothing' scheme, with all your magazines in one spot, you could cut back on armor needed. I really like designs like this. I never understood why ships with heavy rear armaments caught on but with only 25-40% of their guns being able to be brought forward. The latter war US BBs seemed to fix that issue with the twin triple turrets up front and one aft.

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It was the choice between going all-in on a theoretical tactic that may or may not have worked, or taking that money and buying dozens of time-tested torpedo boats. In addition, our budget would only allow one or two to be made, since they were massive, so they'd be making their charges alone.
While I'm not super well versed in naval history, I'd guess part of it was physics. Putting all your heavy guns up front probably played hell with the aquadynamics. Some pulled it off though, in particular the Nelson-class the Brits used IRL. We had a similar design with Caesar's Palace. Another thing, which I've used in RtW, is to focus the armament on the rear section to allow for effective retreats. By cutting down the armor and investing in speed, you can choose when to engage and still give effective fire while running away. This particular design wasn't quite that, but performed extremely well.

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With the Nelson class, the Royal Navy decided to make the best of the Washington Naval Treaty and built them to what they would need. Within the text of the Treaty, all fuel, lubricating oils, water, propulsion systems, and the necessary equipment to contain and operate were not taken into account in the displacement of the ship. Furthermore, no nation was allowed to make rifles of greater than 380 mm, but they were allowed to use barrels that existed at the signing. For the Royal Navy, armor and range were the most important requirements, so the speed and horsepower of the turbines was reduced. There were many other acts of "questionable" accounting in determining displacement, but dreadnoughts were the queens of the seas, and were not to be allowed a long leash.

11 unrest. Isn't 10 where you'e careening into autorevolution? Is RNG going to compromise the peace we're trying to attain? Is it rising not just because of war length but because of how everything we've built is a cramped short-range shitbox? Will the British come crying for hard terms already before it all goes pear-shaped? And come to think of shitboxes, what do we even have on colonial tonnage duty?

In retrospect, getting just one of the Romas might've been workable, since we had enough gap time to embark on screen projects and without the trouble of acceleration some very workable emergency building programs. Except for the fact that she'd probably have gotten ingloriously torpedoed offscreen.

Post the link you got the game from, OP

Apologizes for the rather large time-skip, the last in-game year was filled with extremely minor engagements and minor events. Unrest is at the highest level I've seen it, should we go for hard terms or just take whatever peace will come? About half a dozen AMC Q-ships just came out of production, which is why we're running such a high balance.

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There's a big enough gap in capital tonnage- or there should be, unless Britain's battlecruisers in construction count- that the AI would be stupid to not see the writing on the wall. Hard terms if they haven't filled the tonnage gap we blew into them back out. If we don't get Gibraltar all this will be wasted. But if we don't have a decisive on-paper advantage after all, then just go to peace negotiations and hope we've enough points for what we need anyways. Shame we produced a bunch of Q-ships that are likely about to be sold right off.

The ride never ends.

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We're at above 10 unrest and scuttled a peace.

THE FIRE RISES.

Go for it. We've finally got usable screens to spare, which means we can start sacrificing them to murder the enemy again. We should probably get a fresh run of light cruisers going with our surplus once we get the chance, though, because destroyers can't lay smoke screens or carry meaningful gun batteries and I think we're running low on them based on that sparse availability count.

True, our CLs have been rolling very badly on the mines/subs events. This would be a slightly smaller variant of the Biggus Dickus-class. She carrier 24 fish, a modest defensive armament and has decent speed.

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If we bumped her up to normal range so that she can move strategically in wartime, seeing to our lack of militarily useful colonial tonnage- even if everything seems to fall to the Med with West Africa and the Indies as an afterthought- what would we have to squeak out? And if we wanted to keep the current layout at increased displacement for the range, what would that look like? The normal range'll also be necessary to prevent fuel run-out events, if we have a Speed machine set.

Furthermore, a more dedicated colonial raider seems wise to project & likely construct; higher displacement, armament slanted towards longish ranged 5-6 inch guns (depending on quality) over torpedoes. A little heavier than the Biggerus Dickerus we have here, more Atlanta than Kitakami, long range and fast enough to outrun anything on the water. Colonial accommodation if possible. Purpose is to provide colonial tonnage and butcher enemy merchant marine elements on the cheap compared to our armored cruisers, while being a serviceable screen element even if she isn't a torpedo death star like the traditional designs and capable of getting out of trouble faster than she can be put into it if the enemy decides for a colonial strategy.

Since the game ends at 1950, we probably wont see them do much, but here is a design that I believe meets your request.

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What's this game and can I remove eternal anglo in it?

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Also can we play as any redpilled nations in this?

I highly doubt you'd be capable of playing this.

The sheer loss in tubes & mines for more fuel range seems pretty bad. From 24 to 12. I apologize for jerking you around, but I think we might want to stick to the original short-range 5 inch gun projection for the limited gametime left, and if we're going to build/project a colonial raider rather than move on and get back into the thick of it, purpose build it at a yet higher displacement of 8000 or so- and I'm going to guess we hit the hard weight limit for CLs since you only jumped 500 tons up- likely with only nominal finishing-blow torpedo & mine allotment.

A longer-ranged fleet torpedo cruiser would certainly have to be fatter regardless, because halving tube capacity to go to fronts the enemy isn't really bothering with for lack of basing (because we stole them all out from under them) is not acceptable. I ought to check the posts and count it out, but how many times did we even get engagements in the Indian Ocean and West Africa? Once or twice each?

This Holla Forums-impersonation shitposting is pretty gauche, Holla Forums. Not 'getting gauche,' it just is. But to answer the exceedingly obvious question, yes you can remove Anglo. No, there is no fascism save in headcanon and only of the OTL Italian reactionary compromise variety, and in-game only less than transcendental-idealist hawkish policies in turn-of-the-century monarchies and one big stick democracy. And more to your actual interest, gommies only appear as back-biting social violence events that cause your budget to suffer and to lose wars and literally cannot do anything right from a gameplay or meta standpoint.

You're better off just not replying user.

Are we gonna start another game after this one finishes? I'd like a shot at playing the CSA or Spain.

If you merely call the low effort false-flag shitposter shitheads and impersonators they will unfailingly pretend to take offense and sperg out while accusing you of being what they are. If you ignore them outright they will likely repeat the false enquiry or sperg out, or pick a new angle. Having openly identified them, called them a dumbass, answered the initial enquiry, and then spat in their face, the matter is now closed and they have no casus belli to continue shitposting, having been given the answer and closed off from any more while caught in the act. They are now safely ignorable, filterable if that's your thing, and can be reported for deletion if they try to go nuclear for getting cucked out of 'subtly' shitting up the thread in question through sockpuppetry.

If we don't wait for Rule the Waves 2 sometime later in the year, CSA or Spain might be interesting. I imagine the CSA is in a similar position to Italy of troubled policy & modernization, but with German sub bonus, while Spain as I recall is super-Italy in having terrible everything and a terrible time sorting their shit out, worse even than Austria-Hungary in all respects save that they start with a colony or two. Then again, it might be nice to go for a powerhouse in waiting like Germany, where we won't be on so skinflint a budget as we are in an early Japan playthrough or the entirety of our Italy playthrough and can actually fully apply some of our more interesting theories & builds, like the Roma which was designed for lateral & vertical proofing against 16 inch guns in a wide range band sharply or moderately angled, while having a huge frontal firepower and still-good rear firepower to batter its way through enemy battlecruisers, or build more than two or so of each generation of raider-battlecruiser/super AC. Although the fighting for budget did make for good drama and help balance out the captain mode torpedo shenanigans.

I'd rather do the CSA personally.

Fair enough.

One little case of mistaken identity and everything goes downhill.

8000 is the limit for CLs, I was just trying to keep it's cost/time low. I've gone ahead and put in a couple of these on order.

Spains pretty fun, especially if you don't use foreign shipyards to build your stuff.

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Can we see a clean screenshot or two of our own holdings before selecting spoils? Algeria is a rather obvious claim unless we need to dicker around points to use them all (although we could leave points out and get a base resource/budget increase if the manual is accurate) but elsewhere we obviously want to take things that are within our current spheres of influence & basing if we can help it, rather than get entangled faraway. I recall us avoiding Indochina for this reason and focusing on the Med & both ends of Africa.

see I do not believe we hold any Eastern colonies.

In that case, there's two strategies here; just snatch Algers and the Antilles- one is in our purview already, the other is in more or less firmly allied waters- and keep the rest as base budget, or because we're at the end of the game anyways and FUCK FRANCE, take Annam & Tonkin and have an Italian Vietnam. It might be a bit dangerous since it's in British-occupied waters without great American counterbalance unlike the Antilles, meaning it might get taken out from under us as an army action if we don't close things quickly, but again, fuck France. Would anyone else like to weigh in?

I say fuck the frogs.

I've chosen to take Algeria, Antilles and New Caledonia. Also, it turns out I was wrong, we held Polynesia. Despite the French surrender, unrest has remained high. However, the patrol requirements have dropped considerably and we should ("SHOULD") stop getting our shit kicked in by subs. Oh, and the US took Tonkin.

However, a small force of Brits consisting of a CA, AMC and a handful of DDs apparently was sufficient to open a front in West Africa. Should we divert some ships there to deal with this?

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We kicked their battlecruiser fleet in the pants, they don't have the numbers to contest us on all fronts, and the AI is unlikely to resolve to exploit our lacking mobility to keep local superiority in our colonies versus continuing attempting to break the Med or else defend their home waters, pressed on three sides as they are.

What does their African fleet look like more particularly? Specific classes? We should aim to at least match their presence. One of our supercruisers, either the older Mussolinis' Lamborghini type or the Mingxia depending on how easily the enemy can be outmatched, a superior DD complement, an AMC or two of our own that aren't needed for ASW duty now that France is out of the picture, and some of our minesweeper gunships. And since we have so many subs that no longer have to assist in a Mediterranean blockade, we can spare some of them to wreak havoc on fleet support in this endeavor. If our light cruiser force stops being so anemic any time soon, we could spare one to the task force. All this assuming we have enough of the ships in question that have the range to redeploy there in the first place.

While we're at it, we should consider what we can split off into the Indian Ocean, as there are all of two invasion targets and that jewel simply can't be taken by VP; we won't get another, better chance to steal her away.

Britain has a quite small CA force with most of them interned. The CA they've assigned to Africa is a brand new Europa-class. I've chosen to send the 'Minghia', along with some Faggots, as our older Musolini's Lamborghini-class was designed with cramped quarters. Looking at 10" gun data, we can see that the 'Minghia' is effectively immune to those calibre rounds between 15000-20000. From 15000-8000 she retains a slight edge due to a larger armament, higher chance of lucky bounces and 7" guns lacking high penetration, but once the gap closes to about 7500 or so her armor gives to both British calibres. Thankfully, she's nearly as fast as the slightly smaller Europa, so this should not be a problem.

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Can we blockade them instead?

In all honesty, I'm so used to being the under-gunned faction I didn't think of that. It's possible, although 'Caesar's Palace' and 'Chef Boyardee' would have to remain behind as they aren't capable of leaving the Med during wartime. In addition, the majority of our DD force was designed with cramped quarters and short ranges, so they're out also. All of this stemmed from the fact we were fighting defensively in almost every war up to this one. These factors would leave us in a similar situation to the Brits, bringing in heavy Capital ships with very few screens.

Now if this goes well, it won't come to that.

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If we can't bring our destroyers it'd probably be unwise to try.

Oh thank you God it's over

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Gibraltar is 5. It's in our hands. Angola is 3. It'll round out our firm hold on West Africa nicely. Now, put up the sign.

MEDITERRANEAN: CLOSED

NO ANGLOS ALLOWED

Wew lads, it's been a journey. Viva l'Italia! Viva l'Regia Marina!

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Those bastards. We already gave them concessions during wartime and now they're going to wreck the Empire.

Since we've reach well past the end of the game and are about to hit the forced end, I might as well go over some ships I would like to mention.
Only legacy ship that survived the entire game. Spent her whole career in the Med as a medium gun platform.
Original DDs of the Italian fleet, survived to the end. Spent the last 40 years or so of their career as coastal patrol boats.
Somehow escaped a museum to fight Anglos. Not that I let her, but still.
One of the three ships of an ill-fated attempt to mount a 6" gun on a 600t DD. Held out till the end, mostly as a patrol vessel. Of note is that both her sister ships were lost to mines.
Precursor to the Mussolini's Lamborghini heavy cruiser, served primarily in the Indian Ocean keeping our East African colonies safe.
One of the original Faggots and the only one to survive. Follows the pattern of old DDs becoming coastal patrol units.

And finally, a look at our fleet as it stands and the losses we sustained. Shall we officially end the game?

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We accomplished all our goals, I think we can comfortably call it quits. What's our final prestige?

And what's our ship with the most battle stars?

71

Ave Caesar, Chef Boyardee, Pax Romana, Caesars Palace, I'll Grande Cazzo di Italia, Toto Sapore, MussosLambo, Bersagliere, Baguette Eater, Biggus Dickus Mk.II and some DDs all carried 7 at the end.

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This is the end, no doubt about it. We could've ridden out the postwar years and melancholically balance the budget a little, but there's no way to make anything notable happen. I feel it's prophetic that the only non-legacy capital ship we ever seem to have lost in battle was Italia il Audace- whose history I want to see, along with the Mussolini's Lamborghini class- my foresight-engineered baby and the torchbearer of our national aspirations. As soon as she gets done in?

Boom. Unrest through the roof, three more years of war, and postwar naval spending not having time to be manually adjusted down from 'extravagant' levels (in spite of the huge surplus fund) instantly lets left-socialists slash it to pieces. The way it looks, I don't think anything short of putting the entire fleet into reserve status could put us back in the green. I wonder what the rest of the world was doing, outside the tonnage numbers. We never heard from Russia again after that one goofy nominal war with them, I think they were allied with France at the time and just couldn't do much. America and Germany obviously helped us kick Britain's head in. Austria just existed in a sad torpor after we mugged them for if I remember right their Turkish possessions, because we wanted to get it first when it was still neutral.

Thanks for running the threads back in the day, user. And again for resuming them on zero notice, just on being asked. I hope it wasn't too much to put up with my and the other anons' incessant design requests & strategic quibbles. How'd we do, do you think?

How the fuck did you outdo us as Spain? What are you?

all those dead screens tho

The tin cans did alright.

Thanks for running this, it was fun.

I can't wait until nations will actually fight each other.

I love these threads because they're one last glimmer of light in a board of shit. I love reading them, even though I'm shit at the game. I just lurk. Thanks to the user who's running these.

Actually, 15 million a month was in construction. Halting half a dozen DDs, one of the CLs and some subs brought it to a manageable bleed.
The thing that I'm most impressed is that we got lucky enough with the neutral nations in the Med. Sometimes you just can't get one to flip.
Believe it or not, I actually lost an early war in that one, when France and Britain teamed up on me around 1905.

That's one of the things I'm hoping for too.

Honestly, I like it best when inexperienced anons post, since it generally makes thing more interesting. You end up with things like this.

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I, uh. I think I've been here since the very first Japan thread you ran, of which I think you did two total. Look, the max scale gun that can reliably hit destroyers is 6inch/150mm, I looked at some heavily-gunned WW2 destroyers like the Type 1936A without looking at the standard displacement being four times higher… mistakes were made.

The notion of having a destroyer that can easily plink other destroyers to death as if it was a light cruiser turret on pontoons was perfectly sound! Just not at that displacement. At all. Probably would've done better if built as a minesweeper, honestly. And as I recall, they did manage to pinhole an actual light cruiser one time.

A late game design could have been viable, yes.

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'ROF -10' is a bit vague, innit.

Can you access ship histories from the postgame? I'd be interested in looking at capital ship designs, in chronologic parallel. It really does seem like the next-generation ships through the mid to late game were influenced by our shitting on pre and non-super dreadnought ships with our 1910 series of ships and their torpedo escorts, based on the Rouen & Requin and their English equivalents.

Thanks for running it, Rule the waves is a game I prefer to watch others play then play myself.

Afraid I can't see other nations old designs. Almost every other nation ended up settling down with 10x16" designs, with some small variation of the number of guns or with 15" guns. In fact, since we were so far past the endgame, most of the nations designs were pretty much identical, often with basically unchanged 'new' designs. With that being said, the US probably had the most "fuck you" Dreadnought out of them all.
I think, although I'm not sure, that it's a 10% decrease. Don't quote me on that.

Molte grazie. After running three of these, I probably couldn't stand to watch someone else do one. Mark my word that as soon as RtW2 drops, I'll come back here and run a campaign with you guys. Not sure if I plan on doing another RtW1 campaign, perhaps if we had some limitations like were discussed earlier in the thread.

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I'm looking forward to all the new mistakes that seaplane catapaults will enable.

If she didn't have Imperator Nikolai cramped turret syndrome, she'd be beautiful. Such a waste of good traversal. Though I do have to ask; don't even battleships get deck torpedoes once you get high enough in the tech tree, or does it only go up to armored cruisers? It's strange that the submerged tubes still show up.

Like I said before- build aviation cruisers with a heavy seaplane complement (perhaps exploiting their already low-and-slow nature to make some kind of sea-Stuka, since if they're never not going to be more than gracefully turnfighting pigs in the air thanks to fixed pontoons they might as well be turnfighting pigs that shit out a ship cracking bomb on their recon runs) and finagle the parts to class them as carriers for treaty tonnage purposes, should game mechanics allow, like how we got the Mussolini's Lamborghini and others in its family classed as armored cruisers when they were really just low/medium-displacement early battlecruisers with a half inch of belt shaved off past the minimum for the class.

Then laugh as you build more pocket battleships than you should be able to while no one can legally stop you and bully the shit out of merchant ships with fast surface gunships that provide their own combat recon and then some. Flattops are for hosers. Yes, they're quite effective and an inevitable advancement from the 30s onwards, but they're still for hosers compared to all the weird hybrid combat-aviation abominations one can conceive of.

I'm holding off on developing strategy theories until I get my hands on the game, since we don't know how research and other limitations will affect carrier designs. I know of at least one person who believes that a carrier force fielding exclusively air-superiority fighters should be used and combined with Battleships to force 'close'-range fights.

18" VT fused AA

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Air-superiority exclusive flattops sound like perhaps the worst possible use of the platform possible compared to robust multiroles. Using them purely to prevent proper carrier warfare from occurring so that you can instead have and indeed make inevitable a decisive battleship slap-down is patently ridiculous and insults all good strategic sense. I love it for the sheer audacity.

You know, on that note, if the San Shiki shells didn't have shitty copper drive bands, better fusing even if not prox fusing, had more of (or any substantial) a fragmentation element, and maybe used something that stuck & burn like a rudimentary napalm predecessor (I recall the Germans had sticky flame agents, although still phosphorous based, from at least the early war) instead of the less than impressive rubber thermite (except when used against anything other than air or sea targets in the bombardment role, in which they performed fantastically in drowning Henderson Field in fire) which American airmen apparently regarded as 'more pyrotechnic show than anti-air weapon,' would it have been of more use?

The notion of using main battleship guns for DP duty is to our hindsight minds preposterous. It's also hilarious to think of an unsuspecting CAG group getting blapped by 18" incendiary flak, well before coming into reach of the normal DP or point defense guns where the main gun use was disruptive to their aim, and the notion of American four-engine firebomber groups getting intercepted by near-direct-firing IJN ships scything into their flight routes to firebomb THEM is strategically interesting. It's a similar line of thought to the way the Germans were thinking of using sabot technology to directly hit bombers with sub-caliber shots from the ground in the very late war; orphaned and largely unknown, but promising food for thought.

Can someone please explain me why people play this, SS13 or Dwarf Fortress?

Tell me what is the charm, because I don't see it.

Rule the Waves isn't anywhere near as autistically hard to play as it looks, read the 20 page manual and experiment in your first game and you're good to go.

I think even if the shells were better, Japanese gunnery still would have had a lot of trouble actually getting one near enough to a plane, and even with good radar fire control you'd still probably be better off with a more normal fragmentation shell. Apparently the 16"/50s had an AA fuse for the HC Mark 13 shell but I can't find anything on how it performed, unfortunately.

Should probably specify what doesn't appeal to you, since any number of things could make you dismiss this out of hand. Would you ask this same question of someone who plays milsims opposed to CoD? As far as those three games, they're complex and require you to be able to solve varied problems and prepare for the worst eventualities. There's very little handholding, you either succeed on your merits or fail on your shortcomings.

DF is basically The Sims, existing within Sim City, with a (relatively) complex set of combat mechanics. Someone who understands the system can see how individual events impacts the larger picture (dorf is killed in a raid, which causes close family members to become depressed, which interrupts a vital service in the fort, leading to it's collapse) and how best to react to those events.

SS13 is entirely player/admin driven, so you'll never see quite the same scenario play out. You can interact with the environment in almost any fashion and once you understand the basics of the station your imagination is basically the limit. Add in some decent roleplay (unfortunately difficult to find) and a good community (again, hard to come by) and it'll be the most unique gaming experience you can have. One of my favorite memories from SS13 was playing the Lawyer, and defending an obviously guilty suspect in the courtroom in front of a judge and crowd. Much to my surprise, the judge ruled in favor of my client and declared the protesting plaintiff guilty of wasting security resources. He placed her in cuffs and dragged her to the brig. At the end of the round it was discovered that the judge was a changling, who was using the trial as an excuse to get himself alone with his targets.

As far as RtW, it's alot like what I've said at the start: You have problems and you need to solve them, as well as the problems your about to face and you need to make sure that none of your solutions screws you in the long run. Then you've got the ship design interface, which lets you tweak pretty much every variable on a ship. It ties into the "Problems now, then and later" challenge, since the biggest difficulty in creating a new ship design is you yourself. Say you want a new combat cruiser. You're a small nation, you need to keep the costs low, so you decide on a low-displacement cruiser. You could make it hit hard, go fast or be tough, but you sure as hell can't do all three. Thus begins the tweaking of armor layers, weapon layouts and other aspects. Two people can be given the same task and come up with wildly different solutions, as in real life naval history.

Forgive me if this got to far into random ramblings, it's 5AM.

Assassino
Incontestibile
Il Diavolo
Coltello
Lancia
Incorregibile

Games that have an absurd number of variables are interesting because they tend to be a completely different experience every time you play them. I think it takes a special kind of autism; the desire to master the complexity, an appreciation of the system that makes it work in a believable way.

Will you be up for running another campaign as Spain or Germany? Personally I would prefer the latter just to be able to actually have a functional budget for once, but these threads are so good that any nation would be fun to be honest.

Either of those would be cool by me, the only people I really wouldn't be interested in is GB or the US. The devs recently dropped the price on RtW, which makes me wonder just how soon the sequel is going to show.

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Been getting more and more into this game as time goes on, to the point that RtW2 is probably my most anticipated game. Recently had my first highly successful game as the CSA, managed to beat the hell out of everyone in my sphere except the US. normally i only manage to give as good as i get, but i was swimming in victories today. I wonder how ship design will work on carriers.

Also, if any more experience anons could rate my ships i'd greatly appreciate it.

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I'm surprised at how difficult Italy has proved to be. Usually I play Germany, France, or the USA because I like having enough budget to absorb mistakes or actually make ships.
Now in this game all I can do is hope I don't piss off any of the real nations, make treaties with anyone except Russia, and use Austria as a punching bag for prestige and budget. I got to 1920 having been in near-constant wars with Austria, bullying the fuck out of them with heavy cruisers and shitloads of DD squadrons, but now it seems that they've dumped all of their money into battleships and battlecruisers. I have no idea how since I never have the monthly budgets to even build anything heavier than a heavy cruiser.

So now I'm in a position where I'm basically the Kriegsmarine fighting wars centered around subs, panzerschiffes, and destroyers. It's really fun.

You really love to pile on armor onto your BB turrets, especially since they're just 12-inchers. You'd probably have more luck lowering turret armor to 10-12 inches and upscaling them to 14-inchers.

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That would probably be much more efficient, the only reason i armoured the turrets so much is because i didn't build any CA. I felt i needed them to have resilient unbreakable guns so that i could sail into enemy fleets and break their formations for my CLs to pick off the stragglers. Not sure if that's sensible but it seemed to work in the caribbean.

Personally, I'd make the following changes to the BB. Also, what year is this? And if you have the design page, that'd be helpful as well.
Pic related is my go-to 1900 CL design. She's pretty fragile and doesn't have alot of speed on her, but the sheer amount of fuck you packed onto her deck means she regularly sinks legacy CAs.

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The ship completed around 1918, so i think i commissioned it around '15. ignore the gross amounts of unused weight on this pic, the only save i have is from the post end gameplay (1935).

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Between low freeboard and casemates, your secondary ROF/accuracy is going to go to hell in rough seas. It's actually possible that some will be out of action. And yes, I'd still advise trimming out some of the excessive turret armor and spreading it out to the BE/DE. 12" guns are usually pretty out of date by '15, it'd probably be worth ditching the X turret for a calibre upgrade. Finally, this is kind of a personal decision, but I think 200rpg is a bit much. I usually don't take a large ammo stockpile, since I don't like to drag fights out for the time for all of it to be expended.

S.S. Vulva

I can't unsee it now you fucking double nigger. the pride of my nations fleet is a wet fucking cunt, my sides hurt.

I think maybe i'll reduce secondaries in future then, i only use turrets on in-name-only B/BB secondaries. The casemates are just there as a good luck charm against destroyers. the high round count is entirely reactionary to my own play style, a not insignificant portion of my games end at the max timer rather than the normal due to my cautious playstyle. It's the same reason why the guns on my second CL are geared up to be quite strong when approaching at a slight 30ish degree angle, usually from behind if possible. I think i will be trading some armour (and maybe ammo) for caliber upgrades in future, maybe shift the guns around too.

Let me hazard a guess; the 7 inch-5 inch split was the result of lack of legacy tech turret positions for the main battery, meaning you thought you might as well go a tiny bit bigger with dedicated secondary guns to spit a little harder rather than try for DP with six inchers that can't pack the deck full enough on their own? And then came the discovery that the sheer amount of gun slapped on burns other ships down before she goes up like a torch from the unarmored 5 inch deck gun magazines cooking off. I can't imagine those things don't flash fire as soon as something sneezes at them.

If you ask me on the Longstreet, the turrets should indeed be a little thicker than the belt as he's doing, since they're going to be face-on with the enemy almost all of the time. A belt can be angled, but a turret face or barbette doesn't get that option. Although one should of course seek to have the best belt-on armor that you can manage and try to plan around that, inevitably you'll be fighting at an angle to maximize it. Considering how relatively well our 30-to-40 year old clunkers managed to hold up by fighting at angle in spite of total enemy modernity and the huge arbitrary damage gap between our guns, and how often their turrets got knocked out, it seems important to plan ahead for belt-angling and turrets' inability to do so as guns advance.

Here's a question to keep things going; traditional turtleback citadel scheme, or flat All or Nothing? I remember back when we were projecting the hyper-aggressive Roma project, we went for turtleback so that she'd be able to have a wide effective engagement range both angled, belt-on and versus plunging fire, but I've forgotten the exact stats of the two types. And as an unrelated triviality that I think never got answered, what all ships can get deck torpedoes? Can you go full Gneisenau and have deckside finishers on a BB? Is this altogether wise, since I imagine you might get the Long Lance treatment by having your own torps det on deck during a gun duel, which submerged tubes maybe aren't as prone to?

Question from newbie to the game: are Dreadnoughts worth building at all or will they just suck your resources while becoming obsolete junk in late game?

Looking back at our first campaign that I ran about two years ago, we had some…curious designs.

I don't remember what exactly lead to the split, just that the results were very good.
In RtW, guns under 7" do not flash-fire.
The logic for the turtleback was that since the deck also factors into the Belt armor, we could push our defenses past the 18" limit that normally exists. The theory was that since the British guns had penetration values exceeding our own, we would have to close the distance with an absurdly thick armor set.
AON, as I understand it, clusters the important parts of the ship within the citadel, whereas sloped deck lets them spread out. For BBs and BCs, I almost always go AON.
A late tech allows you to mount deck torps on everything except MS. And yes, they can be set off.

Properly built, a Dreadnought can last your fleet decades.

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Thanks. In your experience are battleships & dreadnoughts worth the effort, or is it simply more cost-effective to make bunch of battle cruisers instead because as faster ships they should be able to wreck anything below them and either gangrape or run away from something heavier? Or am I being retarded in thinking that BC's have enough speed to pick their battles like that?

Generally, yes, the idea of a BC is to clobber the shit out of anything smaller than a similarly sized capital and run for port when something tougher shows up. Dreadnoughts are primarily better than BCs only in the sense that you can have a BB with just as much combat power at a smaller/cheaper tonnage since you don't need much in the way of speed. If you plan on making every capital you own a top-of-the-line mega-ship, you might be able to go ahead and just increase the tonnage and cram a bigger engine in to make it a BC. If you're needing a larger fleet, you could make a pair of smaller designs, one optimized for speed and the other for stand-up fighting. Also of note is that BBs excel when running away isn't really an option, like when defending a convoy or coastal installation.

How common those unavoidable battles are? The idea I had in mind was to just create as much as BC's I could afford with Screens as support along with auxiliary Subs. In theory I could use that to bully other countries on my terms at leisure, but I had managed to forget that I can't run from every disadvantageous fight. I imagine that fleet like that might be easy pickings to BB spam if luck runs out.

Honestly, I'd recommend playing through a campaign or two and experimenting. As far as I've seen, almost everyone who plays this has a slightly different strategy for how they build their fleets. It's also worth asking, what difficulty are you running on?

I threw my pride into a garbage can and went with the easiest since I'm new to the game and not yet ready to have my metaphorical asshole torn down without lube. After I git gud I'll give Italy & Spain a go, but I started as Murrica so I could get easy start.

Don't worry about unavoidable battles, i found learning to escape battles that seemed like they were a bit too fair.

How are you handling your fleet management, one of the hardest things in the game for me is deciding where to put ships, and scaling them to the need of overseas territories. I actually find countries like italy easier to manage since they start with less possessions.

-i found learning to escape battles that seemed too fair was very useful if not the most useful battlemap skill i learned.
sage because i was too retarded to post properly the first time

Went through the forums to find information about RtW2

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Here's two design tips. A All Forward concentrated turret placement saves weight since the citadel won't have to be extended. and the Aft Centreline Superimposed doesn't have extra weight compared to the Aft Superimposed since it uses the superstructure to raise the turret instead of creating a tower.

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any anons have links to mark of chaos?

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Presented without further comment.

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Congratulations for absolutely raping Royal Navy. I first thought that it was maybe because you had bigger screen present but looking at the 2nd pic reminded me of UK turret flash fire thing. Hoo boy that shit is hilarious, Brits practically fucking themselves with 7 out of 9 ded BB's lost to that. Now is the time to relentlessly bully them and sink whatever they have left & steal their best clay.

Speaking of which, which British clays are best to steal as Germany? I think that Gibraltar is bit of a double-edged sword since while it forces their ships to go around Africa it also prevents them from getting bogged down in Mediterranean as well. Question is, is Italian or French AI competent enough for having Med as bait for Anglo to be worth it? Other than that uniting Africa and getting Asian clay in order to land troops India might be nice strategy. Thoughts?

Don't die on me.

any good books about WW1 ships?

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Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie

I'd upload it for you but Holla Forums doesn't allow epubs

...

Are there any decent mod to RTW which would add other smaller countries to play as like Netherlands or Argentina?

The nation limit is hard-coded, so adding new ones means dropping old ones. That said, there might be, check the official forums.

nws-online.proboards.com/thread/658/post-custom-nations

Is an AoN scheme before AoN is properly researched still effective? I want to know if flat deck on top of belt with no extended armor and good belt armor before developing AoN's tech is just a fool's gambit.

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Negative, not only there won't be weight saving some components may or may not be randomly hit on extended armor penetrations.

Well, that explains why my previous game involved all my early ships suddenly taking massive but noncritical damage until they keeled over and died.
For that matter, I've noticed that the game keeps throwing my light cruisers out in combat action against heavy cruisers or massed formations. Is there any solution to this, such as building fewer CLs, heavier CLs, more rapey knockout punch CLs, or just running away all the fucking time for 800-1000 time units?

The game is pretty much designed so that engagements won't always be fair from what i can tell. Your best bet is to make sure your cruisers have decent speed so that you can decide whether to fight or force a draw. Alot of enemy ship designs use a single aft gun on cruisers so i tend to have two forward guns in order to have more choice in how i choose to engage an enemy. im still pretty new though, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

Between these solutions, I would prefer,

But you should still want to have scoot ability regardless. I'll have to test my theories fully under my own control, when I set about my own playthrough. But as my theorycraft is churning, I conceive of two main types of CL.

First, the Fleet Torpedo Boat CL, or the Kitakami style. It has a forward gun to shoot, some more guns in back to scoot, and everything else is dedicated towards being a fast deliverer of fish that's survivable enough to escape flirting with the enemy battleline once or twice but not more, because that's all she needs to do. Likely short-ranged, as these tend to be home water defensive tools used to obliterate dreadnoughts that filter into the big hubs of activity while largely ignoring the colonial fronts. You can see in the thread the successes of this design ethic in the Italy playthrough, both with and without smaller destroyer-scale Kitakami types supporting them. They will rape a capital line out of commission or destroy ships outright. The massed formations you speak of will wish they had never come across you, because in exchange for their maybe getting a CL in tonnage, you will be rending the buttholes of their entire formation and taking several ships in return.

Secondly, the Raider CL, or the Atlanta style. It skimps on torpedoes and probably dispenses with them entirely, and trades them for speed, range, and more battery power. You could either go with 6 inch guns all around for a dual-purpose omnibattery like the historical Atlanta, or cram in the biggest main guns you can get at your displacement and then have conventional secondaries, see for this ethic applied to even a legacy CL. The former ethic will have the benefit of vomiting an atrocious amount of shells that will murder destroyers, AMCs, and other light cruisers with ease, while perhaps worrying ACs but running into the problem of likely not getting into reach against them, while the AC will do so earlier and easily.

The latter one, once applied to later technology and higher displacement, will perhaps allow the raider CL to be what the super-cruiser or cruiser-killer is to the battlecruiser; an ersatz of its larger cousin at a glance and more beneath, being an overgunned bully capable of getting into matchmaking its guns and displacement have no sane right being in and being better able to escape bad matchmaking while giving as good as she gets. The leaned-out commerce raider, possibly similar to the supercruiser in armaments but at lighter displacement & armoring, would no longer have to fear typical enemy reprisal, as it would be striking far beyond their range, and be capable of skirting away from anything it cannot fight. Additionally, it would have the advantage as I have always advocated for of being of more use to the battleline than a par or undergunned vessel, by way of being able to reach out and touch enemy ships with more serious glances and lucky hits rather than scratching paint only.

I would note also the possibility of a mixed design. That is, a long-ranged super-raider CL with the Atlanta types' guns and expanded torpedo armament as close as one might get to the Kitakami type. But this is a lot of fish in one basket, and although versatile, would be expensive and run the trouble of being effectively a worse Kitakami in the home defense role and a somewhat more bloated Atlanta with extra short-range kick it won't be eager to use in the raider role, as each ones' design elements seem quite superfluous in the others' role. The utility of a mixed design would perhaps be in not having to produce two separate ones and in having your entire home defense CL count also be potential raiders once the enemy is kicked out of your home waters. But I'm skeptical of whether this would make up for the cost and the risk of losing both roles' fulfillment with the destruction of one ship. Then again, if you have an enemy in your home waters to begin with and everywhere is always raider territory as far as you're concerned, like with Britain-Germany or France-Italy, compression of cost to get more and more versatile boats may be wise rather than trying to invest in two specialized types. We made lots of accommodation & range sacrifices in the Italy playthrough, which gave us a bit of an edge for what we could do with our limited tonnage & budget, but if we had had a few more longer-ranged ships to play with & spare, I think we could've opened up an Indian front to eventually RNG one of the most valuable colonies in the game into our hands.

In short- however you arm a CL, make it fast, make it lean without being anemic, make sure it has a battleline role beyond just bullying destroyers, and where she has no shields, give her thorns.

Basically everything that said is pretty on point. The Brindisi-class the AI gave us for our legacy fleet was a particularly good example of the folly of under-gunning. In at least one instance, we had a 2v1 CL scenario, but lost because our 4" guns were incapable of doing serious harm. I'd also like to float the idea of a battle line cruiser. Pretty much the maximum amount of firepower that can be put on a CL without getting into extremes.

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You know, I wonder about 'getting into extremes.' What's the maximum displacement a CL can go to? Max belt? ACs built as cruiser-killer BCs-in-all-but-name can bloat into the 20-30k range. They worked well enough in our game in spite of a lot of hindering circumstances, and similar ships have a storied history on the RtW forum of murdering dreadnoughts with sheer weight of fire. Can a CL be built as a lightly armored raider AC-in-all-but-name likewise and slam dunk ships outside its weight class with plunging fire & evasion? Something like a fast mini-Graf Spee, proportionally a little bit longer and faster, probably less gun. Can you cram a 9 or 10 inch double/triple or two onto a CL? Could we have contrived an AC with 11-13 inch guns likewise?

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There is a point where this needed to stop and we've clearly passed it.

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Drop it to multiple 9 or 10s for better gunnery and I think that's a perfectly viable proposition. Murder merchant vessels at ranges they can't defend themselves while having a little bit (or a lot of) kick for capitals; it's what the Scharnhorst & Bismarck did, and the former did it with 9x11 inch guns to decent success in the WW2 environ on a BC, so 4-6x9-10 on a CL in the WW1/interwar period should do perfectly fine.

I may have gone a bit far in some places.

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That's not a light cruiser. That's not even a recon cruiser or a fat destroyer, it's a fucking monitor; an MS colonial gunboat grown three hundred tons too fat to technically fit the bill. Like half an Erebus class in tonnage and somewhere around there in guns. It's ridiculous. Unfeasible. Nonsensical. It has torpedoes in spite of being a large littoral ship. It has a minimum-scale lategame battleship gun that might legitimately terrify and destroy an armored cruiser at standoff and at the same time has 3-inch popguns that could hardly make a small destroyer sweat.

Does it work, though?

8000t, 3" belt.

We shall see.

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That is, in fact, the biggest stick I have ever seen in the realm of gunboat diplomacy. 37,500 tons of monitor. 15 individually distributed 13-inch guns in 1899. Tsushima soon I hope.

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Thanks for the elaborate response, user. I love effortposting. I went into a new Jap game to test this stuff out. Since even Japs have shitty early-game torps, I went for the zippy barely-armored CLs bristling with guns and some token torp tubes, while I went with heavy cruisers covered with guns for CAs. Now all these piddly cruiser actions against Russia and France have become curbstomps. CLs can stand on their own against other CLs, murder destroyers, and have enough firepower and speed to run away from most enemy CAs. The heavy CAs are front-loaded 6x10 20x8 16000t jobs that are essentially Panzerschiffes. For now, their 10-inch guns can reliably pen enemy Bs and BCs at closer ranges, and I've had some of these heavy cruisers manage to one-on-one early BCs and come out of it with nothing but light damage.

The entire fleet has a speed of 28-30kts, which still isn't fast enough to catch up with the new 30-32kt designs that the AI is coming up with to counter me. But all it takes is a good hit on an enemy engine room for their ships to start falling behind to get mobbed by these fuckers and finished off by the CLs. It's been very amusing.

My prediction is that the enemy AI will start up-armoring their ships in the future to counter everything up to 12-inch guns, but by then I'll have those torpedo boat CLs up with above-surface tubes up and running. The future looks good.

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Those CAs are likely to fall off in usefulness somewhat early due to the protected cruiser scheme combined with the modestly armored secondaries- they're 'more vulnerable to hull and superstructure hits, as well as splinter damage from near misses,' since they don't have a true vertical belt but instead have an internal turtleback deck for machinery spaces only, like some kind of retarded shirtless Bismarck- but glad to see that the cruiser-killer works so well even under these confines. I don't recall the exact breakpoint or if it's relative, but 'heavy' secondaries (above six inches, may or may not also depend on nearness in caliber) will interfere with primary battery gunnery and cause a modest accuracy malus.

The sheer number of shells you're spitting out, and spitting early in the fight and onwards, may mean this doesn't matter too much. Expect flotation damage or flash firing regardless. But in the mean time, they're going to give colonial fleets a hellish time before something makes them go up or they get scrapped for the next generation of cruiser-killers. I doubt they'll ever get put down by citadel, owing to the decent deck and the nature of the protected cruiser second-deck 'belt.'

I wonder if the protected cruiser scheme can be put to legitimate use for long-range combatants past the early game, as an alternative to light/heavy cruiser AoN? Having your entire belt be a second deck dipping below the waterline in exchange for a little splintering and more horizontal superstructure hits which you won't suffer at far ranges anyways, so that shells get stripped by the deck and slam into the belt harmlessly similar to true AoN without as much investment in the deck thickness itself seems novel. You might just die to attrition splinters, I don't know.

I hope RtW2 has more control over armor schemes and a little less arbitration, like having an AoN concentration of important fighting spaces while still being able to put some belt/deck extended splinter protection on, flat or turtleback citadel, sub-waterline armor, so on. The arbitrary fiddliness of certain autoclassifications and part requirements (research or constructional) is a bit silly.

Well, when I posted that I was well into the early 1920s and making the first wave of true torp CLs and decent BCs. One of the downsides of playing Japan is that unless you constantly antagonize the USA or Britain you're never going to get a good fight against the bulk of an enemy's fleet, save for the early game if Russia overreacts to something you've done. The 1910s CAs performed admirably in their role, which was to handle anything that a ship above 8,000t could do at the transition period. They brawled with early BCs, they murderized anything smaller than a cruiser, and they successfully tweaked the AI to completely abandon the CA class entirely. In my current game, the AI has built absolutely nothing between medium CLs and heavy BCs, which is letting the Torpedo CLs go in on suicide runs, take out the BCs and a smattering of DDs, and let some ~13000t panzerschiffes mop up the rest in a tedious process. I keep up a small but heavy BC/BB force in case the game decides to throw any full-fleet combat actions at me, but they're just icing on the Torp CL/Panzerschiffe combo. It feels like metagaming a bit too much, but the 8000t-20000t cruiser range feels like RtW's achilles' heel.

As for any scheme aside from AoN, I have a feeling that the devs put too much mechanical importance into AoN's effectiveness. The sheer weight savings you gain from the scheme, along with the increased protection of having some random system not shit out, is more than worth it. Especially when you can use that extra weight per displacement to add in some more secondaries or up-caliber your primaries or add a bit more armor.

But in terms of it being viable, the answer is mostly no, save for some CL designs and your own particular style of gameplay. My own style is to send in as many ships as possible as close as possible (if not directly into) an enemy formation, then adjusting into a mop-up operation if successful or a retreat operation if not. At best, you get an overwhelming victory. At worst, you get a loss with a large and conciliatory amount of VPs for your side. What I found most aggravating about pre-1915 gameplay is that you often get a lot of attrition splinter or lucky peripheral hits that don't completely disable ships but rather make them useless. Your ship might be fine, floating, and able to make it back to port, but it's going 8kts and can't keep up with your fleet's movements. With early-game ranges, they're effectively sunk and take 6-30 guns out of the equation, just from glancing splinters or common peripheral hits. Not only that, but they're usually within the 5-15kt range and prime targets for enemy DDs, which torp them out of their misery. I'd much rather a fleet that stays cohesive, effective, and firing for the entire engagement, even it it's progressively blown up or sunk one at a time, than a fleet that survives but is progressively and easily crippled to be blown up at enemy DD leisure. The game's VP and damage systems seem to be set up to encourage the former and discourage the latter, too.

RtW1 is a fun enough game save for the UI issues (why can't I delete/scrap coastal fortifications in a group? why can't I type in speed/direction values during battle? why can't I see current tech limitations such as DD displacement/guns per ship type/in-window limitation reminders?) so I'm not looking forward to RtW2. That is to say, I have no expectations. If I have no expectations, I can't be disappointed.

They lasted that long? Suppose I'm too pessimistic, then. I am curious about how exactly player ships influence AI shipbuilding; the real nitty-gritty calculus of what they react to, the ships laid down, which ships have success, how and where in terms of range, so on. And yeah, Japan is in an odd spot as the ascendant Eastern power. Steered rightly, she can snowball all across Asia and build a fat home water advantage while taking bites out of everyone around her, occasionally yelling at the Anglos when you want a real slobberknocker smackdown.

Suiciding CLs is an expensive proposition. Torpedo DDs are the more disposable screen, first up to bat; CLs less so, as they can throw down smokescreens, gun down enemy screens, and reliably survive for a second run in the same engagement if used responsibly, while the DDs.

What we did in the Italy playthrough- the whole thing more or less, and not just the finale here- was dive near the enemy battleline, form up in parallel, and dump shit on them before ducking & running back behind our own battleline, then leap in for the kill if the enemy was broken or bug out before we take (more of) the annoying crippling damage you hate if they have too many teeth left but seem liable to sink or limp off with heavy damage. Add a dash of long-range dreadnought & AC gunnery from before we got stuck with old ships at caliber disadvantage and you're golden. Otherwise, this formation-on-formation mashing seems like the way to go. Less kamikaze entangling, more fencing riposte and coup de grace, if you ask me, just a little bit more defensively or at least preservationally conservative. But as you're playing Japan, kamikaze is of course the way to go just for the thematics.

The ability of players to use hindsight thought and to plan long into the future very much slants the game towards Tsushima'ing the AI without end in Captain mode; fortune favors the bold and the future-proofer. More than anything, the game is slanted such that you always want to think about the tonnage you'll trade in exchange for the enemies' tonnage, what you can and can't preserve. Maybe Admiral Mode fixes some of these problems, since you can't orchestrate the perfect battle plan, simply organize the operational and R&D ends of the equation, but that's no good for Holla Forums collective playthroughs.

If I had to guess; it's likely to have less of the bad and more of the good, in some degree or another. It'll have a WW2 start, more than likely, and a little more off-screen fighting (any at all, more exactly) & political depth. Aircraft carriers will be broken and hilarious. The lot of that would be more than enough to seize my interest. I'm eager to see what comes of it, even if I'm irritated at how little they've shown off.

Admiral playthroughs are very different. Ships get lost, don't receive or understand orders, hesitate, take too long to form up, etc. My first playthrough I got a surprise fleet battle in bad weather and tried to reorganize my line on the fly and it went to absolute shit, ships sailing in every direction and colliding with their escorts and getting torpedoed out of the darkness. It gave me a better appreciation for why stupid shit seems to happen all the time in naval combat.

One of the people working on RtW2 said that you'd be able to do either an 1899 start or a 1920 start, I think.

I came back to check if there had been a new version since I played over a year ago and TPB upload is the same version as what you posted.

Is there any news on what will be the end date for Rtw2? I'm it would be 1945 with ability to continue until 1960 or 1970 because that would give you insanely long time to mess around with 1899 start, but that might be unrealistic.